A Tale of the Saturday That Came Twice
by WasWoksa
Summary: Probe/ Mickey Castle came to pick up Austin James for a Saturday morning interview, except it's Sunday, and she has no memory of yesterday. As the two work together to unravel the mystery, they round up an array of likely suspects, including a burned out delivery truck driver, two feuding pizza parlor owners, and Mickey's blind date.
1. Chapter 1

Probe was a very short-lived TV show from 1988 starring Parker Stevenson as Austin James, a genius eccentric who founded a scientific think tank and then retreated from it, preferring to isolate himself in his laboratory and emerge only to solve baffling crimes. Ashley Crow played Mickey Castle, his loyal secretary/side kick. The show ended way too soon, and even decades later I enjoy envisioning what this crime-solving duo might have accomplished together, given more time to show their stuff. Enjoy!

The Tale of the Saturday That Came Twice

Chapter 1

When Mickey Castle steered the station wagon onto the gravel lot of the warehouse residence of Austin James, the last thing she expected to see was Austin himself leaving his concrete fortress to meet her outside. He carried himself as always, stoutly erect, chin high, long-legged strides that bespoke an important man in a great hurry. It was such a delightful surprise.

He pulled open the back door first and tossed a lumpy, tightly packed duffel bag inside. Then he opened the front passenger door and plunked himself heavily into the seat. His wavy brown hair still hung slightly damp in the back, at its thickest, and his fine-boned jaw was freshly shaved, faintly musk-scented. Happily, he had ventured outside his usual palette of black, white, and gray and selected a dress shirt with navy blue in the pencil-striped print.

Mickey's smile spread across her face and lit her hazel eyes. "Are you that eager?"

He smiled tightly and buckled his seat belt. "No more or less than I was last night. I need you to make a stop for me first."

Her smile faded. "What kind of stop?"

"I need to run an errand." He watched her hands, both clenching the steering wheel, and her eyes, fixed on him with an unspoken demand. He blinked. "Don't worry. It's on the way." She continued to stare at him imploringly. "Drive!" he urged, and he proceeded to rummage through the glove compartment for a cassette tape.

They had crossed through and northward out of the city, and had heard all of the first two movements of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony before Austin spoke again.

"Turn here."

Mickey signaled right and took the indicated exit off the interstate, but not without a skeptical raising of her eyebrows. "Austin, where are we going?"

His eyes gleamed and he smiled as he noted the worry lines deepening on her brow. "It's just a quick side trip, I promise. I have to check on some geological data at a particular place, at a particular time. Now! I have a theory…" He trailed off, as he was so wont to do when theory became suddenly much more interesting to him than a day planner or a conversation.

"What kind of theory?"

"You really want me to tell you?"

"No."

He smiled again and glanced ahead briefly. "Turn right again just past that sign."

She did as he requested. Her job, ultimately, was to assist Austin, even if he seemed at times to work against himself. Sometimes she felt as though a bigger part of her job was just pulling Austin out of his own head every once in a while. "You know, I didn't go to the trouble of arranging this interview today for my benefit." She paused, waited. He didn't answer. "This is your pet project you wanted to put out there, remember? I'm trying to help you." She heard his sigh, barely audible, but clear evidence of his growing exasperation. That could only be called progress. In Mickey's mind, any reaction was better than none. "I even came in extra, on my day off. Is this your way of saying you've decided not to be interviewed after all?"

With that, she hit critical mass. "No!" he protested, scowling. "I said I'll do it; I'll do it."

"But we're going to be late."

Austin let out a huff, and his clipped inflection gave more indication of his mood than his words. "On a scale of one to ten, ten being most, how badly do you think our interviewer wants to talk to me?"

Mickey rolled her eyes.

"What?"

"Never mind, I know where you're going with this. You're probably right."

His trademark smirk curled the corners of his mouth. "Probably?"

"She _probably_ won't leave just because we're a few minutes late," Mickey conceded, with an emphasis on 'probably.'

"Ha! She wouldn't leave if we were an hour late, maybe more." Seeing the worry lines reappearing across his secretary's forehead, he quickly added, "Not that we will be." He looked ahead out the window. "There!" he said sharply, and pointed. "See that turn off? That's where we're going."

Mickey approached the turn, a hairpin departure on rocky dirt off the paved road. Posted at its entrance was a weather-worn sign prohibiting trespassers. "It's private property, Austin."

"I know. Go on."

She turned dutifully onto the pathway, which rose at a relatively steep grade, winding amid the desert scrub and juniper patches. The route was teaming with wildlife that morning, with jackrabbits and warblers scurrying or flitting away from the vehicle at their approach, and numerous geckos sunning themselves on rocky ledges alongside the road. The morning sun was high, and with all her heart Mickey wished she cared less about the passage of time so she might better enjoy this rare foray with Austin into the Arizona countryside. As much as he claimed to appreciate nature, he didn't often get up close and personal with it. At least, not outside the lens of his laboratory microscope.

"I thought you were in a hurry."

Mickey was jarred out of her reverie by Austin's deep voice, laced with irony. She realized she had slowed to a strolling pace, watching the passing scenery. She pressed the accelerator rather than answer him. "What is this place, Austin? Some kind of private nature preserve?"

He was gazing thoughtfully ahead. "Watch the curve up there. It has a pretty steep drop and no shoulder." He glanced her way. "We're almost there."

The bend in the road continued for a long time through a stretch thick with pinyon pine, and the altitude rose with it. Mickey felt her ears pop. Finally they emerged from both the turn and the forest, and entered a more level area. There, Mickey stopped abruptly and sucked in her breath, astonished. The road appeared to have ended in that place, blending into a sprawling spread of grassland bordered by an upward protrusion of volcanic tuff and granite and dotted with cacti to its rounded precipice. Opposite the rock face stood a steep drop underlining a panoramic view to the East. A sparkling lake lay far below, and the cloud-encircled summit of Four Peaks was its crowning glory.

Austin seemed to pay the awe-inspiring view no mind at all. He left the confines of the car and removed his duffel bag from the back seat. Wordlessly, he produced a set of worn, grey coveralls and began to don them over his business clothing.

Delight quickly turned to dismay, and Mickey opened her mouth, prepared to express her displeasure in a few terse words.

"Don't say it!" Austin exclaimed, holding his palm up flat as though to physically restrain the impending outburst. "I need a rock sample. It gets dusty. I don't want dust on my clothes. Okay?"

She pursed her lips, but finally let out her breath. "I'll wait in the car," she grumbled.

"Come on. Have a look around." He worked the coverall leg holes over his shoes, pulled up, and shrugged into the sleeves. Again, his blue eyes locked on her. They were bright and alert, and filled with good humor. He flashed a smile. "I'll be back." With that, he turned and walked quickly away, his hands nimbly fastening buttons. When he reached the end of the grassland on the eastern ridge, he seemed to simply step off the edge of the cliff and disappear.

Mickey frowned, but she waited at first. She tried so hard to just wait, but as the minutes passed and Austin failed to come back into view, her need to check on him grew. All at once, she rose from her seat and hurried toward where she had seen him go. The wind caught up her abundant blond curls and whipped them back from her face. She spun around in a half-circle, searching for her wayward boss. "Austin!" She reached up and held her hair down at her neck, stopping it from swinging forward again across her face. Her long skirt swirled around her ankles and clung to her legs as she quickened her pace to nearly a run. "Austin, where'd you go?"

She reached the ledge, peered over, and he was still not to be found. Small rocks kicked up by the toes of her shoes rolled ahead and over the cliff's edge, striking dully against other rocks an indeterminate distance down. "Austin!" she hollered into the abyss. "I hope you didn't fall to your death, because I'm not coming down there after you!"

She turned and shot a glance back toward the car. She was alone. Maybe he did fall to his death. Maybe she would have to go down there, just to find out. She reached out and took hold of a rugged pine sapling growing out of the rock face. She stepped forward some more and stretched out her other hand toward another sapling, tentatively testing with one leg for a reliable foothold a favorable distance further down.

A moment before she was fully committed to her climb a strong hand closed around her wrist and sent her heart thumping wildly. "I wouldn't do that," Austin said, from where he knelt above her. He reached down with his other hand and held her firmly under her arm, pulling her over and away from the edge with a grunt. They ended up facing each other, sitting in gravel, breathing heavily. "You're not dressed to go down the hard way."

"Austin!" she sputtered, veiling her surprise and utter relief in anger. She scrambled to her feet. "Where were you?"

He didn't say anything. He merely smiled and pointed toward the south. Mickey followed his finger and for the first time saw the path. It was a rocky, rather steep and winding footpath leading down a more negotiable portion of the drop off. It was rough, certainly, but undoubtedly a path. Mickey chewed her lip and ventured a glance at Austin. If he was internally laughing at her, he was keeping it to himself. He had already stood up, brushed off his clothes, and turned his attention toward sealing a plastic sandwich bag half-full of what appeared to be ordinary gravel.

"So, did you get what you came for?"

He held up the bag and gave it a little shake. Abruptly, he turned and began walking in the direction they had left the car.

Mickey wiped a hand over her forehead. The sun was growing hotter and giving her skin a prickling sensation. She could only imagine the frizzing effect the wind and heat were having on her hair. Her clothes were streaked with dust. "You had to come all the way up here just for that?" she griped, quick-stepping to keep up with him while brushing away the dust from her skirt with a flattened hand.

"Yep." Then he stopped for a moment to fish in the breast pocket of his coveralls. "Happened to find one of these, too, if that makes you feel any better." He produced his prize, and tossed it carelessly in the air for Mickey to catch. She caught it in both hands, a knobby, gray rock about five inches in diameter, perfectly round. It had a small hole at one end, revealing in the sunlight brilliant, violet-colored crystals contained within.

"It's a geode," she observed, inspecting it closely.

"Amethyst, by the looks of it," Austin agreed.

She turned it over again. "You think so? It is pretty. What do you want me to do with it?" She looked up and found he had continued the walk alone and was out of earshot next to the station wagon, unbuttoning the coveralls. She hurried to join him. "Where should I put it?"

He shrugged. "If you like it, why don't you keep it? It can be a souvenir of the day you nearly went rappelling in a dress sans harness or rope."

She grinned at him and tossed it back. "It would be better in a necklace." He snatched it from the air and looked up at her, his lip pushed out in what could only properly be called a pout. She answered it with a saucy smile. Then, more seriously, she said, "But you know we can't take this, Austin."

"Why not?"

"Because it's worth money, and it's on private property. Don't you have to get the owner's permission to take things like this off their property?"

Austin worked one black sneaker and then the other out of the coveralls. "I don't need permission." He jerked his chin slightly toward the car, and Mickey unlocked the doors. Then he retrieved the duffel bag from the back seat.

"You know the owner?" Mickey guessed, watching him bunch up his coveralls in a ball and stuff them back inside the bag. He added both the baggie and the geode and zipped the bag closed.

"I am the owner," he answered with a self-satisfied grin. He flung the bag in the back of the car, then opened the front door and sat down.

One of the more endearing aspects of Mickey's employment was the never ending series of surprises Austin served up from day to day; endearing and exasperating. Mickey gaped at him for a moment before sitting down in the driver's seat and openly staring at him. "All of this? You own it?"

He strapped on his seat belt. "All three hundred thirty-two acres of the land around the end of this road."

"How come you never told me you owned land?"

He blinked and searched her face as though trying to discern the logic of her question. "It never came up." He stole a glance at his watch. "We really are late now. Let's go."

She wagged her head and started up the car. Beethoven's Ninth picked up where it had left off when they arrived. For perhaps a minute, they drove in silence, and Mickey couldn't stop thinking about Austin's land. She never knew his future plans. Even though she was sure he had them, was systematically achieving them and checking them off his mental to-do list as he did so, he didn't talk about them. It was clear, even flattering, that Mickey held a special and maybe solitary place in the inner life of The Great Austin James, but at times he still seemed a stranger to her. She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully and mused aloud, "So what are you planning to do with all that land, Austin?" She cast him a curious glance. "Building your retirement dream-warehouse?"

"Absolutely not!" he exclaimed, lips twisted in an indignant sneer. "This place is a complex natural habitat with multiple, interfacing ecosystems. And the volcanic ash depositories in these hills are like a diary of the Earth going back thousands of years. It needs to be explored, studied, understood." He regarded her sternly. "Not built on." He turned to gaze out the window and added, casually and more to himself than Mickey, "Besides, it wouldn't be practical to supply sufficient power and water at this altitude and distance from an eligible source."

Mickey began to laugh, drawing a look from Austin that was partly perplexed and partly offended. It was Mickey's turn to smirk. "But you still went to the trouble to find out, didn't you?" Peripherally, she saw him duck his head, hiding a reluctant smile. Her guess was spot on, and it thrilled her. "I knew it!"

"Well, I might have considered building a small retreat at one time, maybe an astronomy station for viewing the cosmos with my high-powered telescope. This would certainly be an ideal site for launching scientific inquiries."

"All for science, huh?" She said archly, but decided he didn't deserve further teasing over the matter. "How did you find this spot anyway? The want ads?"

"Auction." His lips grew thin with the memory of a particular triumph. "I outbid a property development firm."

As they continued winding back down the dirt road, Mickey's ears began popping again with the drop in elevation. She made a mental note to come stocked with chewing gum next time she went driving with Austin.

"Stop the car, Mickey." Austin's voice broke into her daydream, urgent but not alarmed. She came to an immediate stop.

"What's the matter?"

Austin opened the door and trotted back up the road a short distance. He stepped off the road up to a knot of ironwood shooting up from the ground. When he reached it, he picked up something, a length of paper, clinging to the cluster of boughs at its base. He returned to the car, sat down heavily, and scowled at Mickey. "You see this? How many miles from civilization are we, and there's still litter? I just don't understand how people can be so careless with their trash."

Mickey took a moment to inspect the paper, which Austin had flattened on his lap.

"It looks like a giant bag of flour."

"It is," Austin confirmed. "It's what's left of a twenty-five pound bag of bread flour. That's commercial grade. Probably fell off a waste disposal truck."

"Maybe," Mickey replied mechanically, before her eyes suddenly lit up and she cried, "No! I'll bet I know exactly where this came from."

"You do?"

"Yeah, I saw it on the news. A deliveryman for a food distributor flaked out on the job and unloaded an entire truckload of groceries for a pizza parlor into a ravine. It must have been near here." Satisfied with her own explanation, she put the car back in drive and continued toward the highway at the base of the hill.

"Why?" Austin demanded, after a period of thoughtful silence.

"Why what?"

"Why would the driver take the time to back his truck up to a ravine and unload each item? Why not just put the truck in neutral and give it a good shove?"

Mickey frowned. "The guy wasn't thinking straight. Why should it make sense?"

"Human beings aren't always sensible, but there is always a reason for how they behave. Every action has a cause and delivers an effect. The deliveryman decided to end his employment. Why did he spare the truck? The way he acted, it sounds like he had more of a vendetta against the pizza parlor than the trucking company. Why? Did the news say what the guy did after he threw away the load?"

"They said he went back to work; he acted like it never happened. Weird, huh?"

Austin rubbed his chin thoughtfully and stared intently at the remains of the flour bag in his lap. "There's more to this than you got from the evening news. I sure would like to find out."

"Later!" Mickey exclaimed. "We have an interview first, right?"

He didn't say anything, but Mickey was positive that somewhere under the lush strains of 'Ode to Joy' she heard Austin groan.

Even after they were back on the interstate and well on their way to the interview site, Austin's mind was still chewing on the idea of a burned-out deliveryman chucking a truckload of groceries into a ravine.

"What was the name of the trucking company?"

"Are you still on that?"

Austin sighed. "I suppose I can find out when we get back to the warehouse."

"I didn't say I didn't know. I'm just surprised you care so much. You really take littering seriously, don't you?" She smiled softly at his longsuffering stare. "Okay, okay. The company was called 'Able Foodstuff.'"

Austin perked up. "Good! Let's pay them a visit just as soon as we finish up this appointment. Who are we meeting?

"You don't remember?"

"I wouldn't forget. You didn't tell me."

"You didn't ask."

"Mickey…"

She smiled, enjoying the little game they played. "The interviewer is Melinda Alvarez of 'American Notables' magazine. You're next month's feature interview. Isn't that exciting?"

He grunted, and Mickey looked at him peripherally and smiled.

"Come on, Austin. Isn't this what you want? It's an opportunity to talk about the things that matter to you, to let people know the things you know, get on board with some of your ideas."

"It's an opportunity to pry into my personal life in order to entertain people waiting in grocery store checkout lines. Let's get it over with and go visit that trucking company."

Mickey grimaced. Slowly, she said, "I'm sorry, Austin. I can't."

"What do you mean, you can't?"

She looked away from his probing gaze, fingered the collar of her blouse. "I already have plans."

He thought about that for a moment. "What plans?"

"Just…plans."

"You have a date."

Mickey pressed her lips together and kept her eyes planted on the road ahead. She didn't know why the subject was making her uncomfortable. Maybe it was just saying no to Austin, especially when he was excited about a new puzzle to solve. She hated to disappoint him.

Austin nodded slowly while he observed her with scientific focus. "You have a date; a blind date, from the looks of it. Your hesitancy suggests nervousness and maybe some embarrassment." He snapped his fingers. "You're doing someone a favor!" It wasn't a question.

He was maddeningly right. He almost always was. At her core, Mickey knew that wherever Austin's investigating took them was bound to be more intriguing and more fun than the impending date, and with very little cajoling, Austin stood a good chance of talking her right out of it. She stifled a smile as hard as she could and resigned herself to an explanation. "You know I went to school in California, right? Well, I had a good friend while I lived out there, and she asked me last week if I would meet her brother, maybe show him around, when he came to town. That's all. He just relocated here."

"Older brother or younger brother?"

She frowned. Austin's train of thought sometimes took strange turns. "Older. What difference does that make?"

"He's recently divorced," Austin declared. "He's making a fresh start. His sister is projecting her desire to help onto a more geographically available surrogate." He tipped his head and smirked at her. "That would be you."

"Excuse me?"

"What else do you know about him?"

"Nothing! Austin…"

He looked alarmed. "That's all you know? Nothing else? For shame, Mickey!"

"Okay, no, that's not all I know, but Austin…"

"Well, let's start with a name. When we get back to the warehouse, I'll find out—"

"Stop it! No, Austin. No! I don't want you to tell me about him. I want to meet him and find out about him for myself."

"What if I could tell you in five minutes that he's a poor prospect and a relationship between you two would never work?"

Something in his tone touched a nerve, and Mickey felt the color rise in her face. "I don't want to know in five minutes. I want to do what everybody else does and go on dates and have conversations and take all the time I need to find out it'll never work!" She set her jaw and held a tight, two-fisted grip on the steering wheel while she veered right off the interstate onto an exit ramp without signaling, and braked at the stop hard enough to upset the stack of cassette tapes in the glove compartment.

Austin stared at her wordlessly.

"Our turn," she muttered, glaring at him.

Perhaps Austin wasn't finished discussing her evening plans, but even he had enough social intuition to drop the subject while his secretary remained in control of a moving vehicle.

The interview was booked at a trendy delicatessen in an upscale area of the northeast suburbs. It had a long order counter with a checkout at one end, and row upon row of small, square tables set with elevated, high-backed stools. The décor was black and white, with accents of eye-popping magenta, and an array of geometric modern art framed on the walls. On a typical weekday, the place was probably crawling with hurried and important professionals, but late on a Saturday morning, patronage was relatively thin. The journalist waiting to interview Austin was not difficult to find. Granted, she would have been hard to miss even at noon on Friday.

Her name was Belinda Alvarez, and she was a seasoned professional at mingling with movers and shakers and semi-celebrities. She was tall and thin and buxom, wearing a clingy chiffon dress with a low, draped neckline. Her ears and throat were adorned with glittering black and silver jewelry, and her dark hair was caught back in a loose chignon except for one wavy tendril in front, which she tucked behind her ear as she looked up from a leather-bound notebook in front of her. She was sitting alone at one of the window-side tables, and as soon as she saw Austin and Mickey enter the room, her amber eyes, heavily framed in sable eyeliner to give them even more of a catlike appearance, gleamed and she stood and hurried to meet them near the door. She caught Mickey's eye first, and extended an expertly manicured hand to her, smiling warmly. "Are you Miss Castle?"

"I am, but call me Mickey." She smiled back, looking up; and up a little more. Belinda was already tall, and her three-inch stilettos only enhanced that effect. Mickey took a step back, partly to introduce the guest of honor and partly to avoid peering up Belinda's nose. "And this is Austin James," she said, beaming a little. She never ceased to delight in introducing Austin to other people, almost like a child at show-and-tell.

"I'm Belinda, and I am so very glad to finally meet both of you." Her eyes were on Austin with these last few words, and the warmth of her smile ramped up visibly. She grasped his hand in both of hers and squeezed.

Austin accepted the exuberant offering in stride. Whether he was flattered or annoyed by the intimacy of the gesture, he didn't show it. His poker face was firmly in place. He set his best impassive stare on the journalist, a look that was known to make many of its objects squirm under the scrutiny, and he allowed only the barest of tight-lipped smiles to warm it.

Belinda wasn't squirming. It seemed to Mickey that she was accustomed to fielding a lot of attention, good and bad, and probably relished all of it. "Thank you for giving me your time, Mr. James," she was saying, pumping his hand one more time before she finally released it. "I can't tell you how much I've been looking forward to our interview. Do you prefer I call you 'Mr. James?'"

"Austin is fine."

"Good, we'll go with first names, then. Shall we sit down?" Linda led them back to her table by the window and they all sat. She picked up her pen and her ready smile appeared again. Despite her forwardness, she was otherwise quick and purposeful in her movements, self-confident, and not given to a lot of idle chatter. She was just the kind of person suited to blunt the edge off Austin's reservations. "Are either of you familiar with _American Notables_ magazine?"

"No."

"Never miss an issue!"

Belinda chuckled lightly at them both and turned to Austin. "I'm not surprised you'd say that, Austin. I'm sure your interests reach far beyond our target audience. We do, however, have a broad appeal to the population at large. Our purpose is both to entertain and to educate. That's why we're interested in interviewing not just celebrities in the entertainment world, but also the upper echelons of business, science, and technology. We are interested in personalities, Austin, from many walks of life." She paused to regard Mickey and Austin in turn with a significant smile. "And I understand you have a very interesting personality."

Eyebrows rose in either skepticism or alarm, perhaps both, and Austin glanced sideways at his secretary. "Oh?"

Belinda bit her lip, reining in her apparent amusement. "I assure you, Mickey told me nothing about you but your availability for this interview. I was referring to the research I did on you. For instance, you are popularly known as 'The Great Austin James,' and yet almost nothing is known about you as a person. I combed all the media I could get my hands on and I found a total of three interviews from the past five years, all trade journals. You have two stock photos you use for articles, neither recent. You founded a think tank giant and are almost never seen there. You apparently live in a warehouse. And you seem to have a knack for solving baffling crimes. Are you a modern day Sherlock Holmes?"

The scrutinizing look had vanished and Austin smiled and rubbed his brow, combed a hand through his hair, shifted in his seat. He looked up again, his expression still unreadable, his hair now spilling haphazardly over his forehead. "I have no special talents, only passionate curiosity."

"I've heard that somewhere," Belinda mused.

"Albert Einstein. And he has many more quotes and a great deal more personality than I do," Austin shot back.

"He's dead; not a very good candidate for an interview," she replied smoothly. She licked her lips, leaning forward. "I prefer my subjects alive and kicking."

She may have been flirty by nature, but Belinda, Mickey suspected, was cranking up her charms more than usual for Austin's benefit. Mickey had come to accept that there were women who threw themselves shamelessly at Austin, although the reasons for it eluded her. At first glance, she had him pegged as a quirky, awkward, science geek. Maybe, under favorable circumstances, his posture exuded a magnetic power and confidence, and maybe he wasn't so hard to look at. What was truly perplexing was that he either didn't notice or simply didn't care that women responded to him thus. That such a genius in the lab could be so dense among mixed company was a mystery unto itself. Mickey glanced at him now, and he was looking squarely at Belinda with a strained expression. His answer was terse, irritable.

"No, I am not a modern day Sherlock Holmes; merely an ordinary curious citizen with more than typical time on my hands. Next question?"

For the first time since they sat down, Belinda broke eye contact long enough to hail a waitress. She placed a drink order, waited for Mickey and Austin to do the same. She slipped back into her business mode, with her ebullient smile still in place. "I am rather curious myself," she began. She stopped, looked at Mickey, and after a moment she smiled thoughtfully at her. "How long have you worked for Austin?"

"Me?" Mickey started, suddenly alert, now finding herself included in the interview. "Um, close to a year now; about ten months, I guess." She glanced at Austin. He was still watching Belinda. His eyes narrowed.

Belinda smiled to herself and looked at Austin again. "Historically, you haven't been interested in hiring your own staff, have you? In fact, a year ago you told _Modern Physics Quarterly_ magazine that despite your business partner urging you otherwise, you only intended to keep a secretary, quote, 'when Borneo reaches absolute zero.' So what happened in the space of two months?"

Austin shrugged; his expression remained unreadable. "I changed my mind. It does happen sometimes. And I don't mind being proven wrong, even if it's by the corporate brass of Serendip."

The interviewer considered this, and returned her attention to Mickey. "If you don't mind my asking, how in the world did you manage to land the position of first permanent secretary to this man?"

"Belinda," Austin interjected, a fresh edge to his tone, "if you came here to interview my secretary, why was I required to come along?"

But Mickey was already answering the question. "That's kind of a funny story, actually. You see, I was really hired by Serendip first. I showed up one morning with my résumé, just hoping for any opening, and it turned out they had this position that wasn't even posted yet. The CEO himself came out, looked at me, looked at my résumé, and asked me if I could start in two days. Then he told me as long as I passed the drug test, I was hired." She realized she had drawn Austin's attention and she studied his face, searching for a hint of anger. But she didn't find it. He actually appeared somewhat interested. Encouraged, she blurted, "Convincing Austin to let me stay was the hard part."

"How did that come about?" Belinda raised her eyebrows at Austin. "You can answer that, if you'd rather."

He exhaled, long and low. "I'd rather not."

"First, I had to finish a limerick," Mickey said, smiling wistfully.

"Your interview consisted of finishing a limerick?"

"Oh no, that was just to get my foot in the door. The interview was telling his plant why I left my last job. Austin still didn't want me there; not until I reminded him I solved the limerick and he owed me. So then we did a field test, where I had to follow him around and write everything he said down in a notebook. That went on for a day and a half."

"She quit six times."

"But I couldn't, really, because he wanted to finish the field test. But by the end of that, I felt I had earned the position and I didn't want to quit anymore. So he made me finish one more limerick."

"Well, after quitting six times in one day, she had to prove she was serious about the job."

"And after that, I was in!"

For the first time, Belinda's confident smile faltered. To Mickey, she said, "If that was the field test, what made you want to keep a job working for someone so…" She glanced at Austin, smiling coyly, "So, demanding?"

For just a moment, looking at it from the perspective of the magazine journalist, Mickey could see her unspoken point. What would cause her to sign on board with such a difficult, eccentric boss? Mickey hadn't even shared the whole of it; the demand from the CEO to get Austin to pay his water bill or he'd fire her himself, the first encounter with Austin at home in his isolation chamber where he was napping naked, the dead bodies, the killer computer program, the giant spider, the broken arm. And then she remembered how his bright blue eyes drilled holes right through her when he had taken her by the arm and convinced her as only he could: "He said he was about to take me on the greatest adventure of my life," she answered. "And somehow, I believed him."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Tristan Tollman had been in no way misrepresented to Mickey by his sister, Darla. He was every bit as entertaining, as charismatic, and as good-looking as she had been promised. Deep brown eyes with a mischievous glint over a lopsided smile and topped with a shock of lush brown locks curling over his collar and ears gave him a youthfulness belying his thirty-four years. He had a broad, athletic build and a whittled waist accented by his tailored linen slacks and loose, silk shirt.

He had shown up exactly on time to pick her up in his late-model, black corvette. He came to the door, flattered her with exclamations over her appearance, expressed disappointment over her mother's being away for the weekend. He presented her with flowers, gave her his arm, escorted her to her seat in his car with an unselfconscious arm curled around her waist. He drove fast, he talked fast, and he had no qualms about quickly burning through the wad of cash in his wallet.

His plans for their date were extravagant. No simple movie and dinner would suffice. He had arranged in advance for hot air ballooning at sunset and dancing far into the night. The plan was to have dinner in between, and he graciously invited Mickey to recommend a restaurant, any restaurant at all. He had no doubt he could get them in anywhere her heart desired.

The balloon ride really was a treat. They shared a basket with four other couples, each of whom was principally occupied with each other. The romance of the context couldn't be topped. From their vantage point above the desert, the sunset was phenomenal, as lovely as the view from atop Austin's property, but maybe not quite as mind-blowing as finding out Austin actually owned that little piece of paradise.

Mickey didn't mean to do it, but she found herself stealing the barest glance at her watch while her date had his head safely turned away, regaling some fellow passengers with stories of his hang gliding expedition out at the Mojave last spring. She lifted her tawny ringlets of bangs off her brow with an impatient huff. Half past six and twelve hundred feet above ground on a gorgeous Saturday evening, and already she was prowling her imagination for a reason to call it a night.

But why? She had every reason to decompress after a demanding, six-day workweek with a little lightweight fun. Tristan was just the fix. Listen to him now, detailing his latest trip to Catalina, of windsurfing endlessly from mid-morning, all day, until the last crimson tendrils of twilight succumbed to inky dusk. This was a man accustomed to the nightlife of the beach scene. He knew frozen margaritas concocted with fresh key lime and the best Baja-brewed tequila, the throbbing of bongos and steel drums until the party collapsed to sleep near dawn at somebody's beach house, lulled by the crashing surf outside.

He was exactly what Mickey needed right now. But Mickey's mind was elsewhere, and the cause of it rested squarely on Austin James.

When the interview had ended earlier that day, Mickey had trailed behind Austin as they walked across the parking lot to where she had parked his wood-paneled station wagon. She was bracing herself all the way, dreading the inevitable grievance he was about to unleash on her. Whatever his objections might be, she firmly believed he shared just as much of the blame. Her intention had been only to stretch the rigid boundaries of his comfort zone a little. Had he just left Tristan Tollman out of it, the impulse never would have tempted her.

But what did she do? A bit of doubt crept in as she assessed his tense jaw and stubborn silence. He hadn't looked her in the eye since they parted ways with Belinda. She had never seen him so upset with her. He stopped, letting her catch up with him, and nudged her arm once as they approached the car. He held out his hand, palm up. She looked at it, looked at him, questioned him with her eyes.

"The keys," he said flatly, finally deigning to look at her.

"Are you that mad?" She handed them over, peering up at him worriedly from under her fringe of bangs. "I'm not allowed to drive anymore?"

Austin opened the door. His eyes flicked heavenward and he let out an audible breath, but at least he was looking at her again. "I was going to let you keep the car all weekend." His tone grew more clipped. "But now it seems I have need of it." He sat down and turned the key in the ignition.

Mickey slid in meekly next to him. She bit her lip, watched him eject Beethoven from the cassette player and press another tape into the slot. "I'm sorry, Austin."

He glared at her for one long moment; it was his characteristic, scrutinizing stare, but with attitude. "Why?" he demanded, face scrunched in a deep scowl.

"Well, if I had known how much it would upset you—"

"I mean, why did you _do_ it?" He backed up the car, turned, and pulled forward toward the road.

Mickey smiled winningly as a glimmer of hope surfaced. If he was talking, he couldn't be too angry. "I thought maybe you wanted a date, too." It sounded ridiculous, even as she heard herself say it. Funny how rational an idea it had seemed at the time. Austin opened his mouth, but nothing came out. It was fascinating to see. She pressed on. "Well, you kept talking about my date: 'Mickey wants us to wrap this up pretty soon; she has a date tonight. Mickey, who is that you're seeing? Is that his real name, because it sounds like a snack cracker?'"

He was smiling. He was leaning on his hand as he drove, covering his mouth, pretending to be put-out, but she could see it in shadow. She was growing indignant again just talking about it, and he was amused.

"I thought you might be jealous."

The smile and the hand were gone from his face. His eyes left the road long enough to fix on her a look that was both shocked and appalled. "What?!"

"Well, I have something to do tonight and you don't. You thought I'd drop everything to help you track down your crazy truck driver and I had a previous engagement. I do! I think you were jealous." She pursed her lips and looked out the window.

"Mickey, do you realize you gave a journalist from a nationally syndicated magazine a plausible reason to insinuate I'm having an illicit relationship with my employee?"

Now it was Mickey's turn to appear shocked and appalled. "I did not!"

"I promised you the greatest adventure of your life? What was that?"

"The truth."

"Then I'm surprised you didn't tell her about meeting me in my birthday suit!" His deep set eyes seemed even deeper when he was upset and shouting like that. He went on muttering in a lower voice, "And I wasn't lacking in things to do tonight, either. I was only trying to divert her attention to the fact that you do have a life outside of…"

He stopped. Mickey's eyes left the passing scenery to look at him curiously. His gaze was level, watching the road, his mouth closed in a thin line. "Outside of?" she prompted.

"Here's your turn." He flicked a quick glance her way and his features softened somewhat. "Outside of work."

For the rest of the drive, neither of them spoke. He had pulled the car into her driveway and stopped before she broke the silence. She searched out his eyes with hers, and smiled in what she hoped was an encouraging way. "You don't have to go, you know. There's time, if you want to tell her something came up." She looked down at the datebook in her hands. "You could have your secretary call her." She looked up again to see Austin staring at her, a hint of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, his features relaxed in begrudging resignation.

"I'll go."

Mickey let out her breath and smiled. "She _is_ pretty."

An eyebrow rose. "Pretty what?"

"Pretty sexy, if you ask me. Pretty tall. Pretty smart. Pretty interesting. And she canceled her plans for you. Maybe you'll even be glad I asked her out for you."

He actually smiled back. He shook his head. Mickey got out of the car, and before she shut it again she called to him, "I want to hear all about it tomorrow."

"You'll have to wait until Monday," he reminded her. "You're off tomorrow."

"All right, then I'll see you Monday, and I'll even let you tell me everything I should have known about Tristan. Okay?"

"A dollar says he's divorced less than six months."

"Five dollars says you're wrong."

"Deal."

She chuckled to herself on the way back into the house. But as she stood inside, leaning back against the closed door and listening to the rumble of his car driving away, a tinge of regret touched her. She had set up Austin tonight to entertain Belinda Alvarez, an indisputably glamorous and desirable woman with impossibly high expectations of him. Sure, Mickey regarded Austin and his many foibles with respect and even affection, but she was clearly the exception. To most people who spent any amount time with him, Austin was obsessive, abrasive, and sometimes just plain weird. Imposing a date on him was unfair, and the only question was, to whom was the greater injustice served by her silly whim?

To assuage the guilt, she made a few phone calls. When she was finished, she felt a lot better, and she had the name of Austin's confounding deliveryman and the family-owned Italian eatery that never received its most recent weekly bread flour. What she intended to do with those facts, she didn't know. Maybe she'd call Austin when she got home that night and leave him a message. He'd already have dug up the information himself, she had no doubt. But maybe he'd be pleased to know she had been thinking about his concern, even if she had been unavailable to participate in it this time.

A smooth, tanned hand wagging long fingers before her eyes and the weight of a muscular arm draped around her shoulders brought Mickey out of her recollection and back to the hot air balloon. She blinked, looked up into the dark eyes of Tristan Tollman, who was standing close enough she could feel his breath in her hair when he spoke. "There you are," he said lightly. "You looked like you were someplace far away." The sun had fallen, and the balloon was drifting ever so slowly in the evening twilight toward ground.

She felt the heat rise from her cheeks. She smiled with compensated brightness and fidgeted with her hands, which were hanging over the side of the basket. "I'm sorry, Tristan. I guess I got caught up with this incredible view. The ride was a really nice idea."

The hand that rested on her shoulder moved down her arm and gave it a squeeze. "You're very welcome. But I hope I'm not boring you with my endless anecdotes. Am I?"

"Not at all."

"Because I don't plan to hog all our conversation tonight. I'll tell you something about me. When I'm in that zone, right there in the middle of the most exciting things I've ever seen or done, I can hardly rein myself in. I hope you find that entertaining, but don't be afraid to call me a bore. I want to know about you. And I think you are a very fascinating woman, Mickey Castle. There's something about you that's…I don't know…mysterious."

She frowned, looked at him skeptically. "You think I'm mysterious?"

"So far you've humored me, listened politely to my stories, and given me a bit of small talk. Darla told me stories from school…" He smiled at her growing blush. "And from what I see…" His other hand had moved to rest on her opposite shoulder, turning her to face him. His nearness made her feel how small she was next to him, and how cramped the space in the balloon basket suddenly seemed. "There's a lot more to you than meets the eye."

"Kind of like a geode?" She looked away, trying to decide whether she ought to shrug off his advances or just pretend to ignore how his thumbs were resting on the edges of her collarbone, grazing the hem of her boat-neck sweater. She frowned inwardly and thought maybe this wouldn't be such a dilemma had she been kissed by a man anytime in the past nine months.

His smile and his stare together were as seductive a combination as she had ever encountered. He might have been irresistible had he been less cocky. "Tell me what you're thinking," he murmured.

She raised her eyes, smiled benignly, stalled. "I was thinking…"

"Yeah?" His hands dropped off her shoulders, making her feel like she could draw a comfortable breath again.

"I think I know where I'd like to have dinner." Her smile brightened, both at the idea percolating in her mind and at the slightly bewildered expression Tristan had assumed. "How do you feel about Italian?"

Mickey's choice of restaurant turned out to be most peculiar. Strange, because it was a full thirty minute drive away from the balloon launch. Strange, because she could only admit she had heard of the place but never actually been there. Strange, because Etna's Little Italy was a family establishment that specialized in deep dish pizza, and Tristan had been fully expecting a venue requiring negotiated last-minute reservations, the donning of the tie and blazer he had stashed in the Corvette, or at the very least, valet. Etna's had none of these.

It was a pleasant diner, quaint. It appeared to be locally popular, with a fifteen-minute wait for seating in one of its three large, interconnected dining rooms. The décor was classic Italian: cathedral-shaped windows, shelves of wine bottles and elaborate brass sconces affixed to walls covered in rococo wallpaper, and pairs of Roman pillars standing sentry between each of the rooms and the lobby.

"Mickey," Tristan said in a low voice as they stood, surrounded by myriad waiting customers in the lobby, "are you sure this is where you want to eat?"

She blinked innocently, eyes large. "You don't like it?"

"What's not to like?" he replied, sweeping the room with skeptical eyes. "I'm more concerned about the neighborhood. Did you see all the broken glass in the street? I don't know whether I like the car parked out on the street like that?"

"Well…"

"Tristan, table for two?" A young brunette, probably still in her teens, with a long braid down her back, wearing black slacks and a crisp white Oxford scanned the room, holding aloft a pair of menus housed in plastic sheaths. Tristan caught the girl's eye and smiled, his concern for his car readily forgotten. He took hold of Mickey's hand and approached their hostess.

"Are you able to seat us by a window?" he purred, flashing teeth. "We'll wait a little longer for a window table."

"Follow me, sir. The seat I have is by a window."

Tristan released Mickey's hand to allow her through the relatively constricted entrance to the dining room, and chose instead to slide his hand up her back, under her hair, caressing the underside of her neck. Her eyes widened and she wriggled away, twisting around to give him a wry look.

"Ticklish?" He laughed and patted her lightly a good distance south from where his hand had ventured. She jumped. "Sorry. I'll keep that in mind." He addressed the hostess again. "I do hope you have an excellent wine list. I'm in the mood for a top notch Chianti."

"I can get you a wine list."

It was at that moment that Mickey saw the familiar face she'd been casually seeking. His close-set, piercing blue eyes were staring right at her from across the dining room near the servers' station, and his expression was grim. She harbored little hope that he had not seen that off-color behavior of Tristan's; so unfortunate. Mickey lowered her eyes and silently released her breath. She wasn't at all surprised to see him there, not since she had seen his station wagon parked in the small lot next to the restaurant on her way in. And she could have predicted his presence anyway; after all, the mystery of the botched flour delivery was of particular interest to Austin James. A little thing like an unplanned date couldn't be enough to keep him away for long.

He was moving toward Mickey and her date as quickly as the hostess was leading them toward their table, and like a collision course realized too late to dodge, they all arrived at the window-side table at the same time. Tristan could barely utter a startled protest before Austin hooked his arm around Mickey's at the elbow and spun her in the opposite direction.

"Excuse us," he quipped, before turning to Mickey. "A word?"

"Who the hell are you?"

The cacophony of patrons' voices, the piped crooning of Sinatra from overhead speakers, the clatter of dishes and flatware were nothing compared to the pounding of Mickey's heart as Austin rose to his commandeering finest. Standing nearly nose to nose with her date, he glared, unblinking and unapologetic. "I'm Austin James, and this is my personal assistant." He deftly caught up a basket of dinner rolls off a passing tray and thumped it on the table in front of Tristan. "Keep your hands busy with this for a minute."

Weaving expertly through the congested aisles, Austin maneuvered Mickey back to the lobby, to a quieter nook between the restrooms and the front entrance. "What did you do to your friend that she would foist that on you?"

"Austin, what are you doing here?"

He smiled in that conspiratorial way that made her want to smile back, even though she didn't feel much like smiling right now. "The same thing you are. Seeing what I can find out about Etna's Little Italy."

"Yeah, and where's your date?"

He glanced at his watch. "At present, she's approaching terminal velocity somewhere over Tempe."

"What?"

"She wanted to do something, quote, 'really crazy,' so I introduced her to a group of skydiving enthusiasts I overheard talking in a club, and they invited us on a night jump. I declined, but encouraged Belinda to go with them. I'm meeting her back at the club in about forty minutes." He peered up into the dining room and looked at Mickey again. "Listen, here's what I already know: The owner of this establishment is Vida Forchetti. She inherited it from its founder, her father, Enzo Gilbertino. They've been open for business since 1948. Since Vida acquired the venue, they've enjoyed tremendous local success, to the point where Vida recently introduced a catering service. Since then, they've been beset by instances of apparent sabotage, including graffiti on the building, gunshots fired nearby even though the neighborhood, while old, has not been rife with crime. Most recently, a particularly important shipment of groceries was destroyed, causing Vida to have to close her restaurant for one day or risk forfeiting a catering contract. Besides flour, that truck was carrying specialty items like white truffles."

Mickey frowned. "Oh. Expensive. So you think the crazy deliveryman has it out for Etna's?"

"No." Austin's eyes were glimmering as he considered the problem. "The deliveryman's name is James Horton. Vida doesn't even know him. I haven't had a chance to run a thorough background on Horton or see him in person, but I'm betting he has no connection to Vida or to her restaurant. I'm missing another factor." He stopped, looked squarely at Mickey, smiled.

She nodded knowingly. "You want me to find it."

"I have to go now, and you just got here. Talk to the employees. Listen by the break room. It's back there behind the kitchen near the rear of the building. If you find out anything I don't know, call me."

"I will." She began moving back toward the dining room where Tristan was waiting, and probably fuming.

"And Mickey?"

"Yeah?" She had reached the pillars at the entrance to the dining room and stopped, framing herself between them.

Austin pursed his lips at her and raised a cautionary finger. "Don't you turn your back to that guy." His eyes swept the length of her up and down, and he scowled. "I wouldn't trust him blinking." He shook his head once, disgusted, then turned on his heel and left the restaurant.

When Mickey returned to her table, she was pleasantly surprised to find Tristan sitting, smiling sheepishly, and not looking a bit angry. "So," he said quietly, turning a bread stick over in his hands, "that's Austin James. Doesn't your boss know it's Saturday night?"

Mickey consciously released the tension from her shoulders and sat down across from him. "I've been trying to teach him that concept for the better part of a year now. I even set him up on a date tonight."

"You're kidding!" They shared a laugh, during which time Tristan poured from a wine bottle on the table into a fluted glass in front of Mickey. "It's Chianti," he said. "Here's hoping you like it. Cheers." He raised his glass and she did likewise, and each of them sipped. For a moment, he looked down at his glass, and when he lifted his eyes, his expression was pained. "Mickey," he began. He grimaced. "I have to apologize. I've been living the beach scene a little heavy lately, and I've forgotten how thin a line it is between fun and obnoxious. It hasn't been a good year for me, and I've been acting stupid, up to and including tonight. It's no excuse, but for what it's worth, I'm sorry."

Mickey made a mental note to bring her checkbook to work on Monday; she probably owed Austin five bucks. She took a second sip of her wine. It really was quite good. "The balloon ride was a very nice gesture, Tristan," she said, charitably. "And maybe if from now on we have more conversation and less…um…touching, I think we could still salvage tonight."

He regarded her silently for a moment, and then he broke into a harsh laugh. "Fair enough. Why don't we start with something obvious. Tell me about your work."

"My work?"

"Yes. You're a secretary who works all days and hours, apparently. I can't imagine what it must be like working under someone like Mr. James. He's pretty intense."

Mickey smiled warmly. "Yes, I'd say that's a very good word for it."

"And protective maybe?"

"Tristan." Her smile faded.

He chuckled and touched her hand, but it was a friendly touch. The wolfishness was gone. "Hey, for a minute there I thought it might come to blows. I'm not saying he was wrong, but he sure didn't like me getting too close to you." He cut short her protest with a raised hand and ducked his head. "Don't be angry. I only mean I can see he's as much a friend as he is a boss. I've followed the career of Mr. James for years now. He's almost legend in some circles. This is probably the closest I'll ever come to actually meeting him in person." He raised his eyebrows and reached for his glass. "As close as I want to come, I think." He took another sip and exchanged smiles with Mickey. "Did I tell you I also work in technology? I'm a consultant."

Mickey brightened. "That sounds a lot like Austin. Do you work with superconductors, too?"

"I'm mostly in nanotechnology. It's another fascinating field."

Their conversation was interrupted by a shout from the lobby. It was loud enough that the heads of all the patrons turned and a hush followed. An instant later, dueling voices, speaking rapid-fire Italian, were quarreling over one another until a petite, buxom woman with a bushy mane of dark hair, and wearing a flour-spotted apron came hurrying out of the kitchen toward the lobby. "My God, Elisa," she cried when she reached the front door, "must you come in with such a commotion? Alonzo, take your hands off your aunt. For God's sake, child, she is your aunt, she's_ famiglia_!"

"But Mother—"

"Hush! This is all nonsense. Come in, Elisa. _Sei sempre benvenuta qui_." The voices all dropped in volume to conversational tones, punctuated by laughter, and a moment later the woman with the apron retreated back to the kitchen, the other woman and her apparent nephew close behind. With the drama apparently over, the restaurant patrons returned to their conversations and the night proceeded as it had been before.

It wasn't until Mickey was mostly done with her chicken carbonara that anything else out of the ordinary took place. She felt a light touch on her shoulder, and she turned to find the hostess who had seated them, the young woman with the single long braid, standing beside her.

"Pardon me, ma'am," she said quietly, "but Mrs. Forchetti would like to have a word with you in the back." She turned, indicated the end of the room which housed the kitchen. Without waiting for an answer, the girl left them.

"What on earth is this about?" Tristan asked, raising an eyebrow at Mickey as he poured the last of the wine from the bottle into her glass. "Shall I order another bottle?"

"Oh no," Mickey said quickly. She laid aside her cloth napkin and stood. "I've had plenty." It could only be assumed that Vida Forchetti's request had to do with Austin and his earlier conversation with her. Mickey excused herself from Tristan, crossed the dining room to the kitchen area, and stopped. The hostess was not to be seen, and neither was the restaurant's owner.

The entrance to the kitchen was hung with two swinging doors, and beyond them down a hallway that ran alongside the kitchen to the rear fire door were a pay phone, a utility closet, and presumably the staff break room. Mickey waited under the exit sign, debating whether to proceed down the hall or enter the kitchen, or perhaps go looking for Mrs. Forchetti up at the front of the place. Her decision was made when the hostess suddenly reappeared, wide-eyed, nervous, and pushed at her, urging her down the hallway and into the shadows beyond the telephone, at the doorway of the empty break room.

Mickey began to step inside the room, but the girl grabbed her arm and kept her at the threshold. "No," she hissed. "There is a camera in there. Stay with me here."

Mickey felt her skin prickle with growing trepidation brought about mostly because of the young woman's sudden caginess. The girl cast a quick glance over her shoulder and spoke in a low, accented voice. "You are the companion of Austin James, no?"

"Yes." For the first time, Mickey noticed that the hostess was not wearing a name plate on her blouse. Perhaps that was deliberate.

"I have a message for him." She pressed her waitress order pad into Mickey's hands and produced a pen from her breast pocket. "Write this."

Mickey frowned. "Why can't you write it?"

"I cannot let this come back to me. Just write." Again, she checked the hallway toward the kitchen entrance. In hushed tones, she dictated, "To Austin James. Please help." Then she recited four names, her voice hardly above a whisper. Three of the names were Italian and unfamiliar to Mickey. One was James Horton.

"The delivery truck driver?" Mickey exclaimed in a whisper.

"Now quickly, put it away." The girl took the pad back and ripped the top sheet off, giving it to Mickey.

Mickey slipped the paper inside her purse. "Do I need to get this to him tonight?" she asked, but when she looked up, the girl had vanished. For a minute, she just stood there, waiting to see whether the nervous messenger might return. She strode slowly up the hallway, picked up the phone, pretended to finish a call. She was about to return to her table with Tristan when she heard the voices from behind the fire door at the end of the hall.

The door was heavy and made of steel, but the voices were loud enough she could overhear most of what was being said. She came closer to the door, then a little closer yet. The first voice she could hear clearly was deep and male.

"…to bring disgrace on us all. I say stop now, before this goes any further."

A higher, feminine voice answered him. "The war has already started. It will never end until she sells what should have been mine. Tell her to make me an offer. I will be generous. She will listen to you."

"Not on a matter like this. I say, end it."

"I will end it. And if she won't sell, I won't be responsible for the result."

"I will do anything to hold us all together. You know that."

"Then you won't turn your back on me now. Will you?"

There was a pause. Then the man replied, "Is that a threat?"

"You know I depend on you, Uncle. You and auntie are my life. Go home." The woman's voice became suddenly much louder as the fire door burst open. "And good night!"

Mickey shot backwards, avoiding a blow from the door, and found herself cornered between the pay phone stall and the wall, face to face with a dark-haired woman with thin features and heavily-applied make up. The woman's expression transformed from weary to alert and then determined in the space of mere seconds. With her eyes fixed on Mickey, she began rummaging inside her purse. She drew an object out of it and held it aloft in shaking hands, pointing its nozzle at Mickey. It was, by all appearances, a perfume atomizer.

In that frozen moment, Mickey comprehended simultaneously that she probably ought to at least attempt to move out of range of the device, and that it was such a ridiculous item for someone to present as a weapon. "Um…" she exclaimed in a rising pitch, lacking any fitting words for the occasion.

The woman with the painted face unceremoniously squeezed the bulb on the atomizer, releasing a spray pungent with lavender and honeysuckle into Mickey's face. She coughed once and closed her eyes against the vapors, and her head seemed full of the overwhelming floral odor. From behind her, she could hear the unbroken din of the dining room, and Frank Sinatra crooning "Forget Domani" from the speakers. It was a moment she would never remember again.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

From the first instant she awoke that morning from an otherwise perfectly restful night, Mickey knew the day was going to be unusually trying. She blinked at the sunlight streaming over her face and across her pillow, lifted her head to see the alarm clock, and gasped. She bolted upright, throwing back the covers, and remained where she was only long enough to pass her fingers over the alarm settings.

"How?" she murmured. It was shut off. Last thing before she had fallen asleep, she had set that alarm. But now it was clearly off, and the time was 8:30, a full hour past the time she had planned to arise. So much for a leisurely shower, and lingering over the morning paper and a cup of fresh-brewed coffee.

Still, she managed to recover the lost time. She put herself together reasonably well, grabbed her day planner and purse from her bedroom, fished in the purse for the keys to Austin's station wagon. The keys weren't there on top where she had left them. Of course not. She rummaged around deeper while she continued on her way out the front door.

On the front stoop, she looked up and stopped short, hand still buried in her purse. The driveway was empty, the car inexplicably, undeniably gone. Stolen? The thought occurred to her, but she quickly dismissed it. Who would steal such an ugly, run-down vehicle? And besides, the keys were gone as well. Her next thought was that Austin had taken them back and just hadn't told her. He hadn't seemed vehemently opposed to the magazine interview, but maybe she was mistaken. Maybe he had sunk to new levels of stealth to ensure the interview wouldn't happen.

With a troubled grimace, she returned to the house to call a cab.

Forty minutes later, a very perturbed Mickey Castle burst into the warehouse of Austin James. She found him reclined on his desk chair, feet up, a sheet of printer paper in one hand, a bagel spread with something lumpy and green in the other. He didn't say a word, but merely stared at her and at least for a moment, stopped chewing.

"What are you doing?!" she demanded, hands on her hips and fire in her eyes.

He looked sidelong to the hand holding the bagel and back again at Mickey. "Having breakfast. And what are you doing?" He brought his feet down off the desk and sat upright.

"Austin James!" Was he actually pretending he didn't know? "You know, I could have reported your car stolen. I almost did. But then I thought you might sneak off today. I just didn't expect to see this." She swept her arm outward for emphasis.

"What, exactly, _were_ you expecting to see?"

"The journalist from _American Notables_! Don't you remember? I set that up myself."

His mouth fell open for just a moment before he raised his chin with an air of indignation. "I'm not sure I understand this strange interest you've taken in maximizing the time I spend with that woman." He stood up, set his bagel aside, and came closer to her, an ironic smile replacing any genuine annoyance. "But for the record, that's really not my style, Mickey." His eyes were inspecting her closely as he crossed the floor to where she still stood near the perimeter of his office area. He came to a stop a few feet away. The smile fell. "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?" He tilted his head at her and frowned as though she were a new and interesting puzzle for him to ponder. "Come over here."

"Austin, something is not right." Her brow was furrowed, hands clenched tightly at her sides.

"I agree. Come."

She followed him to the living area and when he pointed to the sofa, she acquiesced and sat down.

Austin stood squarely in front of her, arms crossed, looking down at her. "Now, let's start from the beginning. Why are you here right now?"

She let out a dismayed sigh. "The interview, Austin. I'm here to bring you to the interview. But everything is wrong. My alarm, your car. I tried to call ahead to the deli and no one answers. And you're looking at me right now like I'm speaking in a foreign language." Her agitation reached a new high and her eyes began to glisten. "I think I'm losing my mind." She stared at her shoes and hoped her eyes wouldn't brim over.

He dropped down to sit on the coffee table across from her, elbows on his knees. "Mickey, what day is it? Tell me what today is."

"Are you making fun of me?"

"No. Mickey, the day. What day of the week is today? Just humor me."

She lifted her eyes to his face and saw something more than calculation there. It was concern. Maybe even worry. "It…it's Saturday."

He was on his feet again abruptly. "You're not losing your mind," he concluded.

"I'm not?"

"But you have lost your memory. It's Sunday." He returned to his computer and began tapping rapidly at the keys. The printer hummed to life and began to churn out data. He typed some more, and then turned around again and straightened to his full height.

Mickey slowly rose to her feet. "Sunday?" she murmured in disbelief. She turned wide eyes to Austin. "Are you saying I went to bed Friday night and didn't wake up until Sunday morning?"

The concerned look reappeared. "No. Saturday came and went, and everything you planned to do, you did. We went to the interview, I dropped you off at home, you went on your date." At these last words, his face darkened and he crossed to the lab table where his car keys were laying. He snatched up the keys and a short stack of papers from the printer. "Let's go."

"Go? Where?"

His expression was resolute and he didn't even pause on his way out the door. "To find out where your memory went," he called.

Not until they were seated in the car and Austin had pulled out of the lot onto the street did Mickey work up the nerve to ask another question. It was such a surreal thing, such a feeling of disconnect and vulnerability to have a chunk of her memory wiped out and yet be in the presence of someone who knew everything. What she really wanted to do was to pin Austin down and hold him there until he used that eidetic memory of his to replay every last detail from yesterday, and then the problem would be solved. But she also knew he would never consent to such tedium, not with answers waiting to be found elsewhere. "Austin?"

"Yeah."

"Where are we going?"

He glanced at her briefly. "I want to see the last person you were seen with last night." He nodded toward the printer papers that Mickey now held in her lap. "Read from that for me."

She thumbed through the papers. She had seen this kind of work of Austin's before; a veritable dossier of information on a person of interest. "James Horton," she read. She looked up, bewildered. "I was last seen with James Horton? Who is he?"

From the lingering look Austin gave her, she sensed it was a question that troubled him. She wished she hadn't asked. But he was patient in his answer. "Do you remember that bit in the news about the delivery truck driver who dumped his load of restaurant groceries into a ravine?"

Mickey smiled. "Yes, I do remember that."

"The driver was James Horton."

"Why was I with him last night?"

"You weren't," Austin replied. "And we'll see him later. Right now, we're going to pay a visit to Tristan Tollman." The words were light but the glint in his eye suggested a more ominous intention. "He's the last person I saw you with, anyway."

Mickey thought about that. She remembered talking to Tristan on the phone, making arrangements to get together on Saturday. He had a lovely, low, rumbling voice and a pleasant laugh. His sister had spoken of his interest in physical fitness. If he had the good fortune to share his sister's matching dimples and dark curls, he was probably very handsome. "You met Tristan?" She couldn't imagine how that ever came about. She wasn't even going to mention the date, lest Austin spoil it with his unsolicited data mining. "So what did you think? Was he nice?"

"No," he replied coldly. He glanced again at Mickey and his features softened. "Read to me about Horton."

Mickey shuffled the papers in her lap and prepared to dictate the information, but one more question nagged at her. She peered tentatively at Austin. "So, how did the interview go?"

He closed his eyes briefly and seemed to struggle internally before he responded. He looked at Mickey. "It was successful. The woman got everything she came for, and then some."

"She seemed nice enough on the phone. What did you think of her?"

"Mick, the report. Please?"

"James Robert Horton," Mickey began, "Goes by 'Jim-Bob.'" She raised her eyebrows. "Really? Jim-Bob?" She turned back to the report. "Forty-nine years old, current job: delivery truck driver for Able Foodstuff, Ltd. Employed two years. Previous job: self-employed motorcycle detail and repair. He was doing that for about ten years. It folded when he served eight months in jail for aggravated battery and criminal mischief." She grimaced at the page and put it to the back of the stack. She began to read the next page. "Here's more: never married. No children. Has live-in girlfriend named Delilah Hank? Hank-ee? I'm not sure how you'd pronounce that."

"Where does he live?"

"Let's see. Oh, here it is. It's in Scottsdale." She read off the street address. "That's not too far from you, Austin."

"Wonderful."

It wasn't long before Austin steered the car into a gated community of modern townhomes called Jasper Ridge. He located his target residence and pulled into the driveway. Mickey got out of the car quickly, leaving the papers behind, prepared to run a little if she was to keep up with her boss. Austin's legs moved as fast as his thoughts while he was in pursuit of answers to his latest riddle. Even now, he was standing at the front door before she made it up the walk.

He knocked three times, firmly. "City gas!" he hollered. "Anyone home?"

In only a moment, the door was pulled open, and there stood a man who was drop-dead gorgeous. His dark, curly hair was tousled over his forehead and ears and his tanned face was lightly peppered with day-old stubble. He was wearing slouchy lounge pants and a plain white t-shirt, the two parted at his midriff just enough to show a smattering of dark hair and the contours of very well-defined abs.

Mickey raised her eye brows, but Tristan didn't see her at first. He saw Austin, and for just a moment he seemed to teeter on the verge of slamming the door closed again.

"I need to talk to you, Tristan." Austin leapt on Tristan's momentary hesitation and opened the door fully, pushing his way inside. "You have a couple of minutes, don't you?" Tristan moved a step backward, by necessity to avoid a collision with Austin, and Austin held open the door for Mickey to join them. He closed it again behind her.

"Mickey?"

More than anything, Mickey wished his face looked even remotely familiar. She had met him. Austin said she did. But she remembered nothing of it. All she knew was that Austin, for whatever reason, had not taken kindly to the man. "Hi," she said awkwardly, trying very hard to smile like she meant it.

"Are you okay?"

"Why wouldn't she be?"

"I'm fine. Thank you."

Tristan turned to Austin. "What's with the 'city gas' business?"

"Would you have opened the door to me otherwise?"

Tristan shifted glances between Austin and Mickey, laced his fingers together, rocked on his heels. His feet were bare. "Maybe you want to tell me why you're here. Is something wrong?"

"Yes," Austin answered, locking eyes with him. "I left her with you last night and somebody drugged her. Know anything about it?"

His mouth gaped open before he cried, "That's why you're here? To accuse me of drugging her? Are you insane?"

"I didn't accuse you. I asked if you knew anything about it. But since that's your assumption, did you?"

"Of course not! Why would I drug her?"

"I can think of a reason or two."

Mickey sucked in a sharp breath and stiffened, too mortified to speak. If Austin didn't finally win a punch in the mouth over that one, he might consider playing the ponies.

Tristan wasn't, apparently, the sort of man who reacted to confrontation fists first. He was angry. His face was red and his hands finely trembling, but he didn't strike out. Surprisingly, he deflated a little. "Look, despite what you think you saw, I'm not like that. I'm sorry if I offended you." The two men stared each other down for an uncomfortably long moment, and Mickey stared at both of them in fascinated dismay. Whatever the cause of the rift, they understood each other perfectly. Mickey found herself feeling strangely voyeuristic over the entire matter. Tristan finally broke the impasse. "Your point was taken."

Austin gave a single, curt nod in return. His disposition hadn't gained much warmth, but much of his bluster faded. At least his tone changed from antagonistic to simply crisp. "But the fact remains, Tristan, somebody got to her. And as far as I know, you were the last person seen with her last night. That's why I'm here."

"I wasn't." He glanced at Mickey, and quickly looked away. "I'm sorry, Mr. James. I wish I could say otherwise, but it wasn't me."

"You didn't take her home?" The bluster quickly reappeared.

"She left with somebody else. I couldn't make her come with me if she didn't want to, could I?"

Mickey's mouth was opened in an "o." "I left with somebody else? I wouldn't do that, not unless…" She stopped, looked worriedly at Austin. His face was composed, but grim.

"You had supper. Then what?"

Tristan raked a hand through his curls. "Nothing. I thought it was going well. We talked about going dancing later. We were hitting it off."

"And then…?"

"A girl, it might have been the hostess, came up and told Mickey the owner wanted her in the back. Mickey thought it had something to do with work, with whatever she was talking to you about earlier. She left, and I waited. And after fifteen minutes or so, I went back there to see what was taking her, and…" He hesitated, glanced at Mickey again with a troubled expression. He licked his lips.

"And…?"

He turned back to Austin. "She was just sitting there."

"Where?"

"In the back, in the staff room. She was sitting there and watching the clock on the wall. And I asked her if anything was wrong. All she would say was she had a headache and wanted to go home. She was just waiting for the right time."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know. It's like I said, she wouldn't tell me. So I walked her back out to our table and I went to get someone to take the check. When I came back, she was gone." He looked at Mickey. "You don't remember any of this?"

She shook her head.

"Did you look for her?"

Tristan was keeping his eyes on Mickey now. "I ran outside and I found her in the parking lot. There were two guys with her; one was young, the other was old. They must have been from the neighborhood; I think they were speaking Italian to each other. I didn't think they worked at the restaurant because they weren't dressed for it. They were talking with her. The old guy said he'd take her home."

"And you let him?" Austin's color rose.

"No, I didn't let him! I thanked him and tried to get her to come with me, but she kept going back and forth. I'd get her to come with me, and then the old guy would start telling her how she wanted to come with him and she'd start going off that direction."

"So you let them take her."

"I couldn't stop it." He turned away, rubbed the back of his neck. "The younger guy got the jump on me. He sucker punched me while I was busy with the older guy. When I came to, they were leaving in a car."

"Oh my God," Mickey breathed. The hair at her nape prickled.

A fleeting glance from Austin landed on her, and he turned angrily back to Tristan. "At what point did you decide you didn't need to notify the police?"

"I didn't know what to report. What could I tell the police? She wasn't fighting them. She wasn't acting like she didn't want to go with them. She just said they'd take her home and not to worry about it." He looked at Mickey. "I did call you after I got home. And you answered, and you said everything was fine. If you were drugged, I didn't know it. Honest, I didn't."

* * *

Mickey was seated beside Austin again in the car after the encounter with Tristan, and she knew he was unusually preoccupied. He hadn't even bothered to select a tape for the player. "So, what do you think?" she asked. "Did Tristan have anything to do with it?"

"I doubt it," he answered wearily. He steered the car down the ramp and merged smoothly back onto the highway.

"What makes you think I was drugged?"

He gave her a wry look. "Why else would you suddenly forget an entire day of your life, even as you were awake and responding to it?"

"Mental illness?"

"That would be a pretty sudden onset, Mickey."

"Well, it runs in families. I had a great-aunt who wouldn't let anyone into her house for decades, and after she died they found out she wallpapered every room with soup labels and she was living with three dozen cats." Austin didn't answer her. In the silence that followed, another thought occurred to her. "If it was a drug, though, shouldn't it only affect my memory from after I took the drug?"

Austin sighed. "Yes."

"Then tell me why I'm missing everything from after I went to bed Friday night."

"I don't know. It doesn't make sense." He glanced at her. "You didn't receive a blow to the head, did you?"

"No." She thought about it a moment longer and frowned. "I don't think so." Austin wasn't saying anything else. Mickey let her eyes rest on him as he drove. His frown lines had grown prominent around his eyes and mouth over the course of the morning. He looked so tense. Maybe that was evidence of deep thought, or perhaps he was just uncomfortably stymied. She turned her attention to the glove compartment. Austin loved his music; he said it helped him think. Why he wasn't putting it to use at a time like this, she didn't know. She opened the box, took out the tape from the bottom of the stack, and pressed it into the player.

A lively mix of stringed instruments sprang to life, and Mickey was rewarded with a curious glance and a hint of a smile from Austin. He listened for a moment, head cocked, and nodded. "Schubert. Good choice."

"Thanks." Mickey still held on to some hope she could eventually expand Austin's music repertoire to other genres, preferably jazz, but for now, if Schubert was all it took to put a smile on his face, she could live with that. "So where are we headed now?"

He glanced at her peripherally. "Etna's Little Italy. I need to talk to Vida again."

Mickey looked at him. "Who?"

"The owner. The one Tristan said you went in back of the restaurant to talk to."

They arrived at the restaurant at the height of the Sunday brunch rush. Etna's tiny parking lot was filled, so Austin parked on the street partway down the block. Under the white-pillared portico surrounding the front door of the place stood clusters of guests, apparently spilling over from the lobby.

"I don't think Vida will be able to talk right now, Austin. Should we come back later?"

He observed the building thoughtfully. "Maybe I don't need to talk to her to get what I'm looking for. Let's go." The decision made, he quickly exited the car and began to walk back toward the restaurant. Mickey trotted to catch up.

"What are you looking for, anyway?"

"Follow me." He led her past the knots of people at the entrance, grabbed hold of her hand when it became particularly tight within the lobby, and continued past both patrons and staff toward the rear of the restaurant. His rapid, purposeful pace seemed to deflect most interest from anyone. Only one young man in the black and white garb of a waiter made any attempt to stop him.

"Sir, where are you going?"

Austin barely granted him eye contact. "Pay phone," he answered curtly, without slowing.

"If you needed to make a call, Austin, you could have used your car phone."

"In here." He continued past the phone and led Mickey further down the hall toward the fire door and into the staff break room. There, he stopped just inside and scanned the room. It wasn't a very large room, just big enough to hold a large table set with six chairs, a kitchenette with microwave and refrigerator, and a coffee maker. A clock hung on the wall opposite the door, and under it, a bulletin board. Austin's interest was the bulletin board. He approached it, eyes searching, until he landed on an elongated pair of stapled spreadsheets with worn, curling edges and multiple pin holes. That, he unpinned and studied carefully. After a span of maybe ten seconds, he replaced the pages on the board and turned around. "Well, I have last night's staff schedule committed to memory. Let's go. Mickey?"

She had seated herself in one of the chairs at the table and was leaning forward, elbows on the table and chin resting on her hands, looking at the clock.

"What's wrong?"

She shifted her eyes to look at him and shrugged, but otherwise stayed as she was. "I was here." She lifted her head, frowned. "I was sitting right here just last night. And now it's gone. Wiped out. I did things, and I don't even remember. Who knows what I did?"

Standing across from her, under the clock, Austin released a long breath. He held the back of the chair in front of him and leaned forward, resting his weight on it. "I don't have all the pieces yet, but I can tell you two things." As he spoke, his eyes were gleaming with determination. "First, I'm getting closer to finding out what happened. I will find out. And second," he smiled grimly. "I think you have something in common now with Jim-Bob Horton." He crossed to her side of the table and nudged her shoulder. "Come on, Mickey. Let's go see what our renegade deliveryman has to say. I'm betting he doesn't remember a thing."

Horton lived in a tiny ranch house with a sagging front porch and a detached garage that was a bit larger than the house itself. The yard was mostly gravel, and the driveway had two tire ruts worn into its unpaved length. A rusted out, green, Cadillac Eldorado and three motorcycles were crowding the drive. Austin left the station wagon behind the Cadillac. As he and Mickey approached the front door, a pair of brown and black Rottweilers paced, agitated, inside a chain-link dog run and barked vigorously at them.

"Charming," Austin muttered. He stepped up to the door and pounded it three times.

"City gas?" Mickey murmured, earning a flicker of an eye roll from Austin.

They waited until Mickey was sure no one heard or else didn't care to respond, and then the door slowly creaked open. From inside the house, she could hear low voices. Framed in the rickety doorway and blocking any further view into the house stood a giant of a man, with a bald head and a long, bushy, grizzled mustache. He wore an oil-stained gray t-shirt, blue jeans, and steel-toed motorcycle boots. His face was severe, unsmiling, and essentially uninterested. "Who are you?" he rasped in a husky voice that dealt a strong whiff of tobacco.

Mickey glanced sidelong at Austin, watching to see what role he'd give her. So far, he had only recoiled a degree and stepped backwards in light of the man's intimidating presence, veiled only by the torn screen partially covering the outer door. "My name is Austin James, from the law office of Schmidt, Schmidt, and Schultz, and this is my associate, Miss Castle. We are here regarding an allegation of wrongful termination of employment. Are you Mr. Horton?"

For a long moment, the man stared at them, speechless. Finally, he shook his head slowly. "I don't reckon who called you, but y'all are a day late. I'm just here taking care of Delilah."

"Where's Mr. Horton?" Mickey asked.

Deep lines formed in the forehead of the man as he looked at Mickey. "You haven't heard about the accident this morning?" He saw their expressions and nodded. "Delilah tells me Jim-Bob went tearing out of here on his hog like a bat out of hell, said he knew who messed with him the other day. You know, with his job. He was going to go put it to rights, but he never came back. Drove his bike straight off a tight curve in the mountains."

Austin frowned at the horrible realization. "He drove his motorcycle off a cliff?"

"Yep."

"In broad daylight?"

"Yep. He was going some eighty miles per hour, and he knows that stretch like his mama's kitchen. Cops say it must have been suicide. If that be the case, poor Delilah don't even get his life insurance. Damn shame, is what it is. You lawyers got anything to fix this?"


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Mickey sat tense and uncomfortable in one of the two student chairs in the police interview room while Austin paced its tight confines like a caged feral cat. Following their encounter with the Horton next-of-kin, his interest in the case had taken on new proportions, and waiting for someone at the police precinct to take his concern seriously was not something he would easily tolerate.

"They're probably still on lunch," Mickey told him as he brushed past her yet again, his hands clutched behind his back, fidgeting restlessly.

"It's two o'clock. Nobody's at lunch."

"How about if we get some lunch, then?" she said, smiling hopefully. "I'd love lunch."

Of course his mind was far from food. It was no wonder he was so skinny. "If Delilah heard right, it sounds like they're not even thinking of this from a foul-play perspective. They'll slap a 'suicide' stamp on it, or at best, an accidental death, and never look back. I have no doubt the toxicology report will come back positive for alcohol, maybe THC based on the smell of his home, and that will be the end of the investigation."

"So why are we here? You're going to change everybody's mind when you show up and tell them it's murder? Has that ever worked for us?"

He stopped his fretful pacing for a moment and let out a breath. "No," he said quietly. He turned troubled eyes to Mickey. "I just want it on record now that the conclusion was challenged. Maybe it will make it easier to get a response later, when I find some evidence." He glanced up at the door and sighed audibly. "Or maybe I should just get the evidence first." His lips pressed together in determination and he picked up Mickey's purse off the floor and handed it to her. "Let's go."

But no sooner had he decided his next course, and the door was swung open by a uniformed policeman with a heavy jaw and a bland expression on his face. When he saw Austin, his expression became animated, but not in any positive way. He shot a quick take down the corridor over his shoulder and turned back again. "James!" he exclaimed. "Somebody out there's laughing at my expense right now. They pull me off report to handle a concerned citizen up front with information on the Horton case. I might have known it was you again."

"Hello, Sergeant."

"Okay, I'll bite. Why am I supposed to be looking at murder?"

Mickey bit back a smile.

Austin wasn't even a little amused. He stared darkly and lifted his chin. "Do Mr. Horton a favor and don't assume it was suicide. The guy was on his way to confront someone he thought manipulated him into losing his job. He was angry, not desperate. Think about it. His delivery was meant to go to Etna's Little Italy; He troubles himself to take it up to the mountains and dump it, and then conveniently forgets. Last night, my secretary was at Etna's Little Italy, checking things out for me, and today she can't remember ever having been there. I think there's more at play here than coincidence and I think a drug might be involved."

The sergeant listened. Whether he was impressed wasn't evident, but at least he was listening. "You have to admit it's a stretch, James. A toxicology's been sent and they'll be doing an autopsy in the morning. If drugs were involved, we'll see it."

"You'll assume they were recreational."

The officer's eyes narrowed. "We won't assume anything. So what about your secretary? You must be running her toxicology study. We'll compare notes, right?" He and Austin stared at each other wordlessly, until a small smile emerged on the officer's face and he turned to leave. "I'm disappointed, James. You didn't cover all your bases this time." He nodded at Mickey and left them alone.

"Damn it," Austin muttered, filing a hand through his hair. He scowled and turned to Mickey. "Let's get back to the warehouse." His eyes swept over her and he pursed his lips. "I'll need to get blood and hair samples." He turned and left the room, heading down the hall they had come from.

Mickey grimaced and followed after him. "Can we at least stop and eat first?"

They left the police station, and Austin was either too preoccupied or too gloomy to say much. He did reach over to Mickey and drop the car keys into her hand as they crossed the municipal lot in the midday sun. She smiled. It was such a little thing, but it pleased her tremendously that Austin was giving her back her usual place in their adventures. One morning was more than enough of being disoriented and thereafter relegated to passive case study. She cheerfully slid into the driver's seat, adjusted the seat and the mirrors, slipped the key into the ignition, and for a lingering moment she relished the feel of the sun-scorched polyurethane steering wheel in her eager grasp.

"Are you going to drive, or are you just going to think about it all day?"

She jumped and shot him a self-conscious grin. "Back to the warehouse?"

"Yes." He reached under his seat and fished out a spiral notebook, opened it to a blank page and began rapidly writing lists in rows and columns.

"What are you doing?" Mickey glanced at him as she backed up the car.

He didn't look up. "I'm recreating the work schedule from Etna's. We're going to find the waitress or hostess Tristan indicated lured you to the back of the restaurant. That seems to be when the abnormal behavior began." He scowled at his work. "So far, it appears to be one of six women."

Mickey blew her bangs upward and carefully steered the car back out onto the busy thoroughfare. "Please don't tell me we're going to visit all of them."

"We have to visit all of them. How else will I find out which one talked to you?" He made some additional marks in his notebook. "But we'll still go back to the warehouse first. I need to run these names through OSaP and see if I can venture a likely guess. And I need you to make a call to Miles about Horton; see if I can get in on the autopsy tomorrow. He likes you; tell him you're coming along."

"Do I actually have to come?"

"Yes."

Mickey winced. Even if she should acclimate to being in the presence of corpses, which was doubtful, watching Austin touch and smell and take specimens of everything on and around the autopsy table would never cease to turn her stomach. But her displeasure was forgotten a moment later when she caught sight of a particular sign. "I'm turning," she announced.

Austin looked up in time to see Mickey hang a sudden left, cutting across a median and two lanes of traffic into a fast food parking lot. When they were stopped, he dealt her an offended look and held up his notebook. "If you're going to make an unexpected detour, can you give me a little more warning? I was still writing."

Mickey steered the car into the drive-through lane. "Austin, I'm hungry! I haven't eaten all day."

He read aloud the establishment's sign, a tall, bubble-lettered structure that rose up from the side yard of the place. "Big Bubba's Burgers and More." He grimaced. "We're two minutes from home. Can't you just eat something there?"

"Did you happen to do any grocery shopping since I left you on Friday?"

"No."

"Then you still have nothing to feed me. I'm getting a burger. Do you want anything? I'm buying." She motioned toward her purse on the floor beside Austin's feet, and he picked it up and hunted inside it for her wallet. She coasted the car up next to the speaker, rolled down the window, and studied the backlit menu above the speaker. "Let me get a number three value meal with a Coke, and…" She looked at Austin. "What do you want?"

"I don't need anything." He located the wallet and pulled it out.

"I beg to differ." Mickey turned back to the speaker and squinted at the menu some more. "How about a fish sandwich, hold the tartar sauce, a garden salsa baked potato, and a tall iced tea?" She glanced at Austin and saw no objection, just a failing attempt to maintain his nonchalance. He handed her the wallet.

"What's this?" A slip of paper fell off the side of the wallet and drifted to the floor between his feet. He picked it up.

"It looks like an order ticket from a restaurant." Mickey drove to the pick-up window and handed the attendant her cash.

"It is an order ticket. What's it doing in your purse?"

She leaned toward him to read the ticket over his arm. Her eyes widened. "Austin, it's a message for you. Somebody must have given it to me at the restaurant last night."

"You wrote this, Mickey."

"I did?"

"That's your handwriting." He studied the note. "But they aren't your words. This was dictated." He held up the note. "You wouldn't use such a formal way to address me."

Mickey read out loud. "To Austin James: please help." She read the names and gasped.

"I saw it. James Horton." He frowned. "And two of the other names are employees of Etna's: Joseph Albo and Lydia Para. Lydia is one of the six names I've compiled." He raised an eyebrow. "I guess we have a starting place now."

The attendant handed Mickey two drink containers, a bag full of goodies and change for her twenty. She passed the bag to Austin and put the car back into drive. "Do you recognize the other name?"

"Mateo DiAngelo. Doesn't ring any bells for me."

They arrived back at the warehouse and Mickey went about setting up the dining table with plates and flatware. Austin was more likely to trouble himself to sit and eat for a few minutes if his fast food didn't look like fast food. "Do you want hot sauce?"

He passed right by the kitchen and went to his computer desk, picked up the warehouse mic, deftly pinning it to his collar. "Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto 2. Any messages?"

"Can't you eat first and check messages later?"

Mickey's complaint was overridden by the commencement of Austin's music and his single telephone message, a sultry female voice pouring out from the overhead speakers. "Hi Austin, it's Belinda. I have to tell you, last night was fab. I had an amazing time, so whenever you want to get together again, just let me know and my calendar's clear. But practically speaking, I'm hoping you won't mind if I drop by your place once before I leave so I can augment my piece with a few pictures. Call me."

Mickey's eyebrows arched up underneath her bangs while the message still played. "Belinda?"

Austin had turned his back to her in the kitchen and made a show of digging through one of his cupboards, but she could see his neck turn red.

"The interviewer?" she crowed when the message had finished.

He cleared his throat. He turned around again, a stack of napkins in his hands and the wide-eyed look of innocent surprise on his face that made him look like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He raised a finger at her. "You set it up, you know. You asked her out on my behalf. I had nothing to do with it."

"I didn't!"

"You did, with Belinda as my witness." He returned to the table with the napkins and placed one next to either plate. He set the rest in a stack on the table. He sat down before the plate on which Mickey had arranged the potato and sandwich. Mickey joined him in the opposite seat.

"Well, it must have gone well. She sounded happy." She smiled demurely. "Are you going to call her?"

"I have to. You heard her; she wants pictures."

Mickey bit off a French fry and smiled broadly. "How about for a second date?"

"Absolutely not," Austin replied. He picked up his fork and prodded apart his potato with it.

"Why not?!"

"She's an adrenaline junkie." He paused to take a good-sized bite. After he swallowed, he went on. "Her attention span is minutes. She's a raw food enthusiast. She doesn't know Handel from Copland, and she lives in Santa Monica."

Mickey leaned back and addressed the rafters. "Good grief, Austin, wasn't there anything you liked about her?"

"She did have an interesting odor."

"Odor? If that's the only thing you approve of, I guess she shouldn't get her hopes up." She grimaced at him and took a bite of her burger. For a while, she ate in silence. Her eyes roamed the warehouse Austin called home. It was expansive, and for all of the scientific clutter Austin had accumulated over the years, the unoccupied space still dominated. His living area was comfortable enough and decorated with his relatively few personal artifacts, but it was no more than an island set in the middle of a dimly lit, perpetually echoing ocean. The thought conjured an image of the Earth itself, a miniscule haven of life adrift in its lonely corner of outer space. For the first time, Mickey understood why Austin likened this place to the universe. What she still couldn't comprehend is why he liked it so well. She looked at him, sitting across from her, absently munching his baked potato. "How long have you lived here, Austin?"

He blinked. "I bought this place in '83, the year Howard Millhouse had me thinking Serendip was a good idea. Why?"

She shrugged. "No reason. How come it doesn't bother you, being alone all the time?"

"I'm not alone," he said, pointing at her with his fork. "I told you, I have—"

"—the entire universe," Mickey finished in unison with him. "But don't you ever want more than that?"

He stared at her, fork frozen in mid-air, frowned. "You know that makes no sense."

"I'm serious! What about human companionship? Wouldn't it be nice to have someone to come home to, someone who gets your sense of humor and listens to your theories?"

He broke into an indulgent smile and took another nibble off his potato. "Mickey, I promise you, everything in the world I need to be happy is right here under this roof." He cast his eyes up and around the expanse of the building and ended up back at Mickey. His deep blue eyes were alight with his convictions, and they captured hers and held them.

She knew what he meant to say. She knew he did not mean what, for a terribly awkward moment, she heard him say; that maybe she herself provided that missing human element, thus fulfilling his personal Eden. But that simple knowing was not enough to beat down the blush that rose on her face. She tore her gaze away from his, studied the diamond pattern on her plate, and stuffed her mouth with a handful of fries.

For the rest of her meal, she tried to think about Tristan. When she did finally venture a glance up at Austin, he was busy chewing the last of his sandwich and gazing into space, lost on his own train of thought. She studied him for a moment and swallowed. "Austin, can I ask you something?"

His eyes snapped back into focus. "Yeah."

"What is it you don't like about Tristan?"

Rather than answer, he picked up his iced tea, took a deep drink, and set it down again. "Are you sure you want to hear it?"

"Why not?"

He cocked his head at her, set his face in an expression that was both serious and guarded. "Well, yesterday you didn't want my input regarding your date. You clearly preferred to find out about him on your own terms."

She frowned, trying to imagine how that conversation must have gone. "Maybe I did, at least until after I met him. But now I've met him, and he seems like an okay person to me, but you obviously don't think so. So, yes, I want to hear it."

After only a beat of hesitation, he leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. He studied her with his inscrutable stare while he delivered his unfettered conclusions in a firm and measured voice. "He's a cad. He uses women as props to his ego. He's manipulative. He'll say anything you want to hear to stay in your good graces. He'll make promises and then apologize very sincerely every time he breaks them. And his attention span is shorter than Belinda's."

Mickey's eyes grew wide. "Wow, he really got on your list."

"And he's married."

Mickey felt her late lunch drop like a rock in her gut. Something in the look on her face must have cued Austin to soften his approach, because he suddenly sat upright again and his tone mellowed considerably.

"His sister thinks he's still divorced, or she wouldn't have set you up with him."

She cleared her throat. "Still divorced?"

"He divorced once a little less than two years ago. Last year, he married a second time in Vegas. They separated several months later, but neither has pursued any kind of closure to that union. So legally, he's still married."

Mickey framed her face with her hands, fingers pressing her temples. "I went on a date with a married man?"

"But we know for a fact he didn't bring you home," Austin asserted, smiling thinly. "Therefore, the odds are pretty good you never kissed him." With that, he stood and left the table, returning to his work station and the computer there, his comfort zone.

For a moment, Mickey sat still in her seat, numb. Then she piled Austin's plate and silverware on top of her own, carried them to the sink, and dropped them on the countertop with a noisy clatter. "What are the odds I'll wake up tomorrow and forget this day too? That, I could live with." She plugged the sink and turned on the water. Austin had nothing more to say. Once, as she was washing the dishes, she looked over her shoulder only to see him engrossed in his work in the lab, tapping away at the keyboard of his PC, eyes fixed on whatever was on the screen. Business as usual. Sometimes it made her want to shake him.

Half an hour later, she was back in the driver's seat, toting Austin back to the same Italian restaurant that she had visited now three times in the past twenty-four hours. This time, they arrived shortly before 4:00 to a nearly empty parking lot. Austin was anxious for information and Mickey was cantering alongside him with a little more effort than average.

He marched up to the front doors of the place, gave each door a tug, and found them locked. He pounded with his fist a couple of times. After a very short wait, they heard the lock turn, and the door was opened partway by a stocky young man with close-cropped black hair and smooth olive skin. He was dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt, and his right ear sported a gold ring.

"We open at four o'clock, sir," the young man said firmly. His words were mannerly, but his face was wary, his eyes narrow.

Austin went straight to the point. "We're here to see Vida. Tell her Austin James has urgent business with her."

The young man stared at them, hesitating, before he allowed the door to open further, and motioned Mickey and Austin to enter ahead of him. "Wait here in the lobby," he said when they were inside. The restaurant was quiet, no piped music. Only the occasional voices of employees setting up for the evening broke the relative silence.

They weren't waiting for more than five minutes before the young man in khakis returned. "Follow me. Vida said to show you to her office, and she'll see you if you have a few minutes to wait for her."

"I'll wait," Austin replied. He looked expectantly at the young man, who still stood in the same place, staring at them. "Lead!"

He walked them through the kitchen to a door with a glass window opening to an office with a desk, four mismatched chairs, and a bulletin board full of clippings and notes. To their surprise, one of the chairs was occupied, and it was not, apparently, Vida.

"Uncle, these people are waiting to speak to Mama."

In the chair near the corner, farthest from the door and perpendicular to the desk, sat an elderly man. His hair was mostly white but still speckled with bits of the black or dark brown it once was. He sported a matching bushy mustache, and behind it a ready smile greeted them. He rose to his feet with some little effort. "Welcome!" he said.

His smile reached his eyes, and he warmly pumped both their hands, nodding at them and speaking in a thickly accented voice. "I am called Uncle. I stay here, out of the way, when they serve the supper. You join me? How nice."

Austin smiled in return. "You don't work in the kitchen anymore, I take it?"

The old man laughed. "Never! The kind of cooking I do, no one wants on their plate, young man. Tell me, what is your name?"

"Austin James."

"Ah, yes. We have met, sir. I wonder whether you will remember."

Rarely did Mickey catch a look of such candid surprise cross Austin's face. His eyes were gleaming with enjoyment and he furrowed his brow trying to recall. "Maybe if I knew your formal name."

"Claudio Gilbertino. We have played games together."

Austin slapped his thigh and broke into a hearty laugh. "Dr. Gilbertino! Chess champion of Valencia. How long has it been?"

The old man's eyes turned modestly downcast. "I must believe near twenty years. You were not so…" He held his hand palm down and raised it above his head.

Austin continued to smile broadly at the man. He turned to Mickey. "Dr. Gilbertino taught me a lot about the game. He had some pretty unconventional moves."

"That is kind of you, Austin. But we both know the record."

Mickey grinned. "Did he beat you?"

"Every last, stinking time!" Uncle roared. "And he was…what were you, Austin? Thirteen, fourteen?"

"Twelve."

"Horrible little upstart." He let out a deep sigh and turned to Mickey. "But I have him beat for manners. Has he introduced his lady friend?"

"Uncle, this is my secretary, Mickey Castle."

The old man took her hand and slowly shook his head while he looked intently at her face. "Oh, no, _belle donna_. I must call you Michelle. 'Mickey' is—how would you say?—cute. You do not mind that I call you this?"

She smiled shyly. "How did you know?"

Austin's head tipped in that way it did whenever he encountered a puzzle. "Have you already met?"

Their conversation was cut short when the glass-windowed door opened and a small, round woman with a hair net straining over the mass of her long, thick hair came into the office. "Mr. James, my Alonzo tells me you have something urgent to discuss. So sorry to have kept you waiting. What may I do for you? Oh, hello!" She noticed Mickey for the first time and stuck out her hand. "Are you with Mr. James, or did Uncle charm you into following him?" She exuded good humor and abundant energy.

"Mickey Castle, secretary to Mr. James."

"Everyone sit," Vida directed, seating herself with a small bounce on the chair behind the desk. Mickey and Austin took seats, but Uncle excused himself.

"You meet with your company, Vida. I have another place to visit." His eyes locked with Vida, and she nodded slightly, her smile falling.

"Give Auntie and Elisa my love, Uncle."

He gave her a nod and turned once more to Austin. "We will meet again, young man."

"I don't doubt it," Austin answered. He accepted the man's hand again and watched him leave until he passed out of sight out of the kitchen.

Vida cleared her throat. "I don't mean to rush you, Mr. James, but I need to tend to my kitchen. What brings you back today?"

"Three questions, Vida. I'll make this quick. First, take a look at my secretary. Have you met her?"

Mickey shot a look at him, an unspoken question. He ignored it.

Vida shrugged. "I see a lot of people every day at my restaurant. I don't recall whether I have. We haven't been introduced until now."

"Second, have you heard what became of your renegade deliveryman?"

"No. Has something become of him?"

"He went the way of your groceries this morning."

She drew in a sharp breath. "How horrible! A pity. He must have been not right…" She tapped her head twice.

"The police are looking into it." His eyes studied her for a moment. Then he frowned and looked down. "Vida, you mentioned last night a number of incidents of sabotage at your restaurant recently. I don't know what Mr. Horton's death might mean, but I have reason to believe someone is going to extreme lengths to put you out of business, or at least make things very difficult for you. Does that sound plausible?"

At this, Vida rose to her feet and walked to the office door. Her eyes panned the kitchen through the window. "Do you know how long I have worked in this kitchen, Mr. James?"

Austin turned in his seat to look at her. "How old are you, and I'll venture a guess?"

She smiled softly, but it was a sad smile. "My father loved his restaurant. He called it his other wife." She chuckled. "I have never been away from this kitchen for more than four days. That was my honeymoon. Even when my sons were born, I came back. Even when Romeo died…" She turned around and faced Austin and Mickey again. "The greatest honor my father ever gave me was leaving me this restaurant. I am truly, truly grateful. But the damn place has given me nothing but trouble for the past three years. Some of the family thinks I should sell it. Some say it has been cursed."

Mickey's eyes widened. "Cursed?" She caught a hint of an eye roll from Austin, but she expected nothing less.

"I have a sister. Elisa."

Now she had Austin's attention.

"She and I worked here together in school, but Elisa was hard-headed. She wanted to go away to college and break away from here. So she left." Vida shrugged at this. "I do not blame her. I never did. She got a degree, and then she got a bigger degree, in business. She met her husband. But when Father died and left me the restaurant, all of a sudden she wants her part of it."

"And you wouldn't sell it to her," Austin said.

Vida closed her eyes briefly. "Ah, maybe that was me being hard-headed. But Elisa, God bless her. She'd try the saints! She'd have this place called 'Elisa's' by now. And I have sons. I want them to inherit their grandfather's pride. Elisa is smart. She opened her own restaurant across town. She has a head for business. She's fine."

Mickey smiled sadly. "Do you still speak to each other?"

Vida laughed. "Oh yes, Miss Castle. Oh yes! Elisa and I speak to each other almost every day. We are sisters. I love her. It is the family that is the trouble. This one says she's a traitor, competing with Father's restaurant. That one says I am to blame. Everybody takes sides and shakes fists. It grows tiresome." She stopped suddenly and glanced again at the kitchen. Then she turned back to Austin and clapped her hands together once. "I've lost track, Mr. James. Have I answered all of your questions?"

"Just a couple more, Vida. You have an employee, Lydia Para. May I speak to her before we go?"

Vida looked surprised. "Lydia? She is my weekend hostess only. What do you want with her?" Austin opened his mouth to answer but she cut him off with a wave of her hand. "On second thought, don't tell me. I don't want to know." She opened the door and called out to the cook, a solid, muscular man wearing white, with a head of thick, dark hair and heavily lidded eyes. "Vinnie, would you find Lydia for me? I need her in the office."

The cook, Vinnie, narrowed his eyes and looked past Vida to settle his wary gaze directly on Austin. Then he turned his head and barked in a sharp voice, "Lydia!"

Vida smiled at Austin. "We will be opening our doors soon. Do you have another question?"

"Last one, I promise." Austin set a hard look on her. "Tell me, which side of the family squabble does Uncle Claudio fall on?"

"He is neither. He keeps the peace. If it were not for Uncle, the younger generations would have no reason to restrain themselves. Everybody loves Uncle, and Auntie Inez."

"Mrs. Forchetti?" Standing before them, just outside the office door, stood a young girl with a long, brown braid and large, dark eyes. "Vinnie said you asked for me."

"Oh, Lydia, here you are. Yes, my guests are asking to speak with you. This is Mr. James and Miss Castle. Will you give them a minute?" She placed an affectionate hand on the girl's shoulder.

Lydia was smiling softly when she first approached them, but upon her introduction to the guests, her smile quickly fell. She looked away, her brow furrowed, and dug her thumbnail into the opposite palm.

Mickey exchanged curious glances with Austin. "Is this a bad time?" she asked.

The girl looked directly at her. "I am sorry," she said so softly she could hardly be heard. "Please excuse me." She turned abruptly and hurried out of the kitchen, braid swinging behind her.

"Lydia!" called Vida, taking a few steps in a mild effort to follow her. But the girl disappeared through the swinging doors and Vida stopped and turned around again. "I don't know what is wrong. Something has upset her."

Moments later, the same young man who had brought them to the office came hurrying back to the kitchen. "Mama!" he cried. "What has happened to Lydia?"

"Alonzo!" Vida hurried to meet him at the kitchen doors. "Where has she gone?"

"I don't know, but she just left the restaurant and drove off in her car." He looked at Austin and Mickey in turn. "Did you speak to her? What did you say?" He didn't wait for an answer. He swore under his breath and pushed back through the door.

"Alonzo!" cried Vida.

"I'm going after her, Mama."

"But what about your work?"

"I have to go. I won't be back until I've found her."


	5. Chapter 5

_Author's note: Still with me? Sorry for the delay on chapter 5. Inspiration is a tricky thing to wrangle. Thanks for reading and for your thoughtful reviews. I don't know about you, but I'm having fun with this. Without further ado..._

Chapter 5

"That girl was terrified, Austin." Mickey glanced at him, sitting beside her in the car after they left Vida Forchetti. He was busy exchanging tapes in the player again. He listened to the first few bars of his selection with attention, then smiled inwardly and leaned back in his seat.

"Yes and no."

Mickey shot him a curious look and put the car in drive. "What do you mean?"

"Lydia Para was expecting us to show up, but she was probably hoping it wouldn't happen in full view of Vinnie."

"Vinnie?"

He blinked, and looked at her as though it were obvious. She hated when he looked at her that way. "Vinnie! The cook. That's who she's afraid of. She stayed just long enough to let herself be seen with us and then she got the heck out of there, just as she intended."

Mickey frowned. "So, you think she meant to run away when we came looking for her?"

"Obviously. After all, she's the one who named herself on your list of people I ought to help. She was planning that little scene."

"How do you…?"

"Eye contact, Mickey! She knew you right away. She even took the time to apologize for your getting caught up in the crossfire of the Gilbertino Family Civil War. We just hopped right in the middle of it." He shook his head sharply and grimaced. "Vida thinks Elisa is responsible for the acts of vandalism against Etna's."

"I never heard her say that."

"Just read between the lines. When I asked her about sabotage, she told me two things." He held up his first two fingers to enumerate his points. "First, she's sacrificed her whole life to earn her place as sole owner of that restaurant. And second, her wayward sister strongly disagrees."

"So we have Vida versus Elisa, one more case of sibling rivalry."

He gave her a lopsided smile and raised a finger. "Not quite. It looks more like Elisa versus Vinnie." He observed Mickey's mystified look. "Vida would sooner keep her eye on the kitchen and pretend everybody's getting along. She's not overtly aggressive, but Vinnie is. Did you see him shooting daggers at me from the time we asked for Lydia?"

"No. Who's Vinnie again?"

"I told you. The cook. He also happens to be Vida's older son, the one who stands to inherit Grandfather's pride, remember? If Vida's not willing to share it with Elisa, you can bet Vinnie's not going to hand it over."

"Am I missing something? How do you know Vinnie is Vida's son?"

"Vida told me last night." He grinned. "She does like to talk. Vinnie is hard-driven, ambitious, and Vida depends on him. She pretty much lets him run the place when she's not there, and he already assumes the place is his, eventually."

"So what does this have to do with my getting drugged? Or with James Horton's death?"

Austin's face grew grim. "That's the catch. Someone got their hands on a very powerful weapon in this war, and that person is using it to try and gain control of the restaurant."

Mickey glanced at him. "So I can't remember Saturday because a pizza parlor cook is wresting for control of the family business with his aunt?"

"Yes." He turned away, pondering the situation with renewed gravity. "It's a war, and the generals have resorted to using vendors and patrons as pawns. I wish I had seen Lydia react to Alonzo. He's either in Vinnie's corner or Lydia's, but he can't be for both. Lydia is trying to expose the whole thing, and that can't be good for either Vinnie or Elisa. As far as I can tell, Alonzo's either a threat or a love interest." He paused to give Mickey a knowing look. "Sometimes the difference is a very fine line." His attention turned to the road, and he peered out the windshield and frowned. "Where are you going, anyway?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I'm just driving around until you tell me. Warehouse?"

He nodded.

"Do you really think Uncle is neutral? I hope so. I liked him." She glanced at Austin and saw a smile flit over his face.

"You should. I'm about 98% certain he's the old man who got you home last night."

"How could you tell?" As soon as she asked the question she knew his answer. Quickly, before he could, she blurted, "Eye contact."

Austin threw her a wry look. "Well, that, and the way he already knew your given name. He clearly knows you better than you know him. I've been looking all day for the last person who saw you last night, and it seems I've finally found him. Now I want to talk to him some more."

"Right now?"

He shook his head. "Right now, let's get back to my workshop so we can check out those other two names: Joe Albo and Mateo DiAngelo." He stared thoughtfully out the window. "Let's see what Lydia's trying to show me. So far we have a terrified hostess and a delivery man who was first manipulated into sabotaging Etna's and then into killing himself. I can't wait to find out what's going on with these other two."

When they arrived back at the warehouse, Austin was quick to immerse himself in his data files on the computer, and Mickey heated a kettle of water for tea. When it was steeped, she brought her cup over to his work station and peered over his shoulder. "Find anything?"

He pushed back in his rolling chair and rifled a hand through his hair. "Some. I was actually looking up Dr. Gilbertino just now. His background is interesting. He meant it when he said no one wants to eat his cooking." He smirked at her. "Unlike his culinary-inclined late brother, Uncle made his career in biochemistry."

"Isn't it crazy that someone you played chess with when you were a kid is right here in this city, and still remembers playing with you? How's that for a coincidence?"

"Not really. I was bound to meet up with some of those guys eventually, especially as they've retired and started moving south." He stretched his long legs out and crossed them at the ankle, smiled faintly, while Mickey sat against the edge of the desk with her teacup, smiling back.

"What was it like, playing all those chess experts?"

"What was it like?" He shrugged. "Well, it wasn't something I was ever actively trying to do. I took up chess because it was suggested for me as sort of an extracurricular activity during and for a while after college. For various reasons, I was encouraged by my folks and certain others to funnel some energy into something unrelated to my studies. It was probably a good idea, in hindsight." He stopped long enough to stand up and grab a stack of papers out of a plastic tray next to the desk, cross to a cabinet adjacent to the office and sort through the pages, depositing them on shelves there. "I toured the circuit," he continued. "It was a lot of travel; I visited a couple dozen cities all over the country over the course of about three years."

"Were you on the road all that time?" An image sprang to her mind of an Austin James Chess Prodigy tour bus cruising through the night like many a rock and roll band of that era.

"No. I flew."

"But I thought you don't fly."

He returned to the office, dropped back into his chair, and began tinkering on the computer again. "Not anymore, I don't," he grumbled, leaving Mickey with little doubt that a number of his present-day aversions harkened to things from his childhood he'd vowed never again to suffer. "I played a lot of enthusiasts from everywhere. Most of them were Americans; some were imports, from Europe, mainly. I beat them a lot, and some of them didn't like it too well." He grimaced. "The Russians were particularly cranky."

"I can imagine." Mickey grinned at him. She took a sip of her tea.

"If I played Dr. Gilbertino at twelve, it was pretty early in my gaming career. He must have been second or third tier."

"I thought you remembered playing with him."

"I remember playing with all of them, Mickey." He sounded tired.

Mickey nodded, understanding the underlying sentiment. Uncle remembered Austin because he was trounced by a child, probably effortlessly, at his own game. Austin remembered Uncle because his hyper-retentive memory wouldn't allow him to forget. She frowned into her cup of tea, which wafted a pleasant odor and curls of steam in front of her face. She sipped again. "Did you at least have fun?"

He smiled at her. "Sure, for a while. Before it got predictable." The smile fell. He turned back to the computer and tapped a command. A new page popped up on the screen. He seemed to pay little attention to it as he continued talking. "This time around, I'm more interested in Dr. Gilbertino, the biochemist, than the chess contender. According to his employment records, he spent the last twenty-five years of his career working for a pharmaceutical company in research and development, and teaching some labs at the local university on the side."

A shadow of concern crossed Mickey's face. "So he was developing drugs. That sounds awfully suspicious now, doesn't it?"

"I don't know, Mickey. Maybe he is the one who created our pharmaceutical weapon. But that doesn't make him guilty of any crime. Historically, those who invented weapons tended to believe that the mere threat of what they could do was sufficient to prevent anyone from actually using them." He squinted at his monitor. "Unfortunately, they were largely very wrong. All right, now take a look at this."

"Joseph Albo. That's the other Etna employee on Lydia's list, isn't it?"

"That's the one. But he's been let go."

"How do you know that?"

Austin's fingers danced over the keyboard some more. "Because his work hours were blacked out on the schedule. And look here: he was arrested three weeks ago. Vida writes the schedule four weeks at a time. She probably let him go following the arrest, after this schedule was posted."

Mickey leaned closer to the screen. "Vandalism. He put rocks through all the front windows of a restaurant called Catania's Ristorante and Catering. It must be a competitor. Do you know that place?"

"I have a hunch." Another window popped up, and Austin read it quickly. "I was right. Check out the owner of Catania's."

"Elisa Gilbertino Feltz." Mickey stared wide-eyed at Austin. "Vida's sister?"

"You got it. Looks like a little restaurant terrorism from Vida's camp this time. Let's see where Joseph's case currently resides in the local criminal justice system." He keyed some more figures. He read the next page, and his face fell as he took in the report. He blew out his breath in an exasperated rush. "If I had hoped to pay him a visit, it looks like I'm too late."

"Why is that?" Mickey sipped again from her cup.

Austin set solemn eyes on her and motioned toward the monitor. "He's dead, too."

"How?" Mickey exclaimed, setting the cup down on the desk.

"Guess."

"Suicide? Austin, what is going on here?"

"I don't know. But Joe Albo was bailed out of jail, and three days later he went and shot himself." He studied his computer screen some more. "According to the newspaper report, he tested positive for prescription sedatives. Now I really want to spend some time with Miles." He looked sidelong at Mickey. "Were you able to get a hold of him today?"

"Autopsy's at 7:30 in the morning. You can come, as long as you promise not to touch anything, and I have to bring the coffee."

Austin nodded. "Good. Now, let's check the last name on that list: Mateo DiAngelo."

Mickey finished the last of the tea and brought her cup back to the kitchen while he searched the name. The whole situation gave her a sinking feeling. Over time, the gap in her memory was looking increasingly ominous. She dumped the used teabag and was just beginning to rinse out the cup when Austin called to her from across the room.

"He's a missing person, Mickey."

"What?" She hurried back to read over his shoulder. "Mateo DiAngelo, noteworthy culinary talent in Tuscany fare, recruited from Florence for position as head chef of new Phoenix-area restaurant, Catania's Ristorante and Catering, late last year. Austin, that's Elisa's restaurant!"

"I know. Keep reading."

"Failed to show on first night of work, cleared his condo in central Phoenix of all personal belongings, broke lease, bought one-way ticket to Rome out of PHX. Current whereabouts unknown." She stopped reading and looked at Austin with her face contorted in horror.

In an instant, he was on his feet with his car keys in his grip. "Let's go."

Mickey hurriedly followed him. "Where are we going?"

"It's time we had a good talk with Uncle," he muttered as he pushed open the warehouse door. "I want to know how last night ended."

* * *

Austin had to park the station wagon three houses down from the story-and-a-half, brick bungalow Claudio Gilbertino called home. Cars were parked thickly down both sides of the street in that neighborhood, and from the house itself, every window glowed with lamplight. The sun was low in the sky, but a number of bicycle-riding juveniles and squirrelly young children populated the sidewalks and driveways.

Mickey blew her bangs up off her forehead and shook her head doubtfully. "It's Sunday night, Austin. Maybe we should wait until tomorrow to bother him."

Whatever her reservations, they fell on deaf ears. Austin was already out of the car and taking long strides directly toward the walk-up porch stairs, illuminated by a pair of outdoor, bronze wall lights. He jogged up the stairs and stabbed a finger on the doorbell while Mickey ran to join him before the front door creaked open.

They were greeted by two sets of large, deeply brown eyes in round faces topped with unruly mops of dark curls. Behind them, from within the house, came the cacophony of male and female voices, guitar music, and a television. Both of the small boys who had answered the door alternately stared up at the faces of the two visitors and glanced quizzically at each other. The smaller one finally settled an intent gaze directly on Austin, smiled broadly, and cried, "Mr. Foo-Foo Beans!" He laughed at his private joke, tagged a chocolate-smeared hand across Austin's knee, and disappeared back into the house. The other child had a more suspicious demeanor. He valiantly blocked entry into the home with his little body while he inspected the two.

"I don't know you. Are you strangers?"

Austin's face softened readily into a patient smile and he stooped down to the boy. "You're right, we haven't met before. Is Uncle at home? Go tell him Austin and Michelle are here."

The boy continued to stare for a moment, apparently still sizing him up. "My name's Gabe," he said.

"Nice to meet you." Austin offered a hand, but Gabe looked at it pointedly and shook his head.

"You're still a stranger. I'll go get my grandpa." With that, he slammed the door shut with a good deal more force than necessary.

Austin stood erect and scowled at his chocolate-stained slacks. "Who sends small children to answer the door by themselves?"

"I told you this probably wouldn't be a good time. Maybe we should just go."

"Just give him a minute."

Almost before he finished speaking, the door swung open again, and Uncle himself stood before them, smiling in his amiable way. "My friends!" he exclaimed, pulling the door open wide and standing aside, ushering them into the foyer. "Come in, come in. We are serving our supper, so you must eat with us. Oh no, sir, I see that face! You must have Auntie's pasta or she will take offense, no? It is _spettacolare_."

Mickey entered ahead of Austin, smiling in genuine appreciation of the old man's unreserved hospitality. "Are you sure we're not intruding?" She glanced tentatively over her shoulder at Austin. After a momentary hesitation, he joined them inside, but he had yet to crack even a polite smile.

"Not at all, Michelle." Uncle's eyes were gleaming at Austin as he spoke. "I must confess; I was expecting you tonight." Austin opened his mouth, but Uncle was quick to speak over him. "Not now, young man. We must talk later. First, we eat! Come." He turned and led them down the front hall, past a well-lit but empty parlor room, through a set of French doors, and into an even more brightly lit dining room that was fairly teaming with people. The noise was tremendous, and the fusion of motion, music, and mood hit them like a deluge as they crossed the threshold.

"Mother," Uncle called out in a booming baritone, "my guests have arrived. Come, meet Austin James and his lady friend, Michelle Castle. Is he not a lucky young fellow?"

Mickey's smile froze and Austin visibly stiffened at such an introduction. He glanced at Mickey, but she answered his unspoken query with one firm shake of her head. She saw no good in his attempting to protest against a force of social gregariousness so far exceeding his power to subdue.

Competing conversations in the room momentarily paused as most of the Gilbertinos offered a few curious glances, polite acknowledgements, and smiles to the visitors in their midst before returning to their previous topics.

A gray-haired, apple-shaped little woman wearing a yellow gingham shift approached them with a broad smile. "I am Auntie," she said. Her face was round and soft, with soft brown eyes, and she spoke in a surprisingly soft voice in light of her boisterous offspring. "Come to the kitchen with me and I will fill your plates. We have the fagioli tonight. You like this?"

"I really didn't intend to…"

Auntie squeezed Austin's arm and shook her head, making a tsk sound under her breath and cutting him off with a curious blend of authority and gentleness. "Come, you will like my cooking."

Had Uncle purposely schemed to avoid any relevant conversation with Austin, he couldn't have planned it better. After stunning him with the family milieu and further overwhelming him with Auntie's starch-laden meal, Uncle proceeded to introduce no less than four grown children, their spouses, and each of his many grandchildren who scampered through the house. Afterward, he seated them in the midst of it all at the head of the extended dining room table. There, Austin sat speechless in a high-backed chair, just far enough from the table to allow Gabe's younger brother to come along and plop himself squarely on Austin's lap. The look of helpless dismay on his face made Mickey stifle a laugh with all her strength, until the little boy's mother quickly approached and scooped him up, rattled off a light apology, and walked away, scolding the child in Italian.

True to his word, Uncle would not avail himself to speak to them again until the food had been consumed, the dishes carried off to the kitchen, and the family retreated to various other rooms of the house for their evening entertainment.

At last, when everyone else had drifted away, Uncle reappeared and seated himself next to Mickey at the table. "Thank you."

"For what?" Austin answered.

"This is not the sort of company you would choose to keep. You have been patient with the demands of an old man. I admire such fortitude."

The groove between Austin's eyes deepened. "Then thank me properly and tell me what happened last night."

The old man's gaze lingered for a moment on Mickey before he returned his attention to Austin. "It was an accident. I fixed it as best I could. I am sorry for inconveniencing you both. Please accept my apology."

"It's not that simple, Uncle. In case you haven't noticed, people are dying. I don't believe those were accidents."

Uncle looked away and frowned. For a long moment, they remained, unspeaking, there at the table with only the din of the family from other rooms to break the silence. Finally, Uncle spoke again. "What do you want me to tell you, Austin James?"

"I want to know what drug was given to Mickey. I want to know who gave it and how. And I want to know why."

Uncle closed his eyes briefly. He gave Mickey a small, humorless smile. "It is nothing more than a child's home remedy," he sighed. "We call it the sleeping potion."

"Go on."

"When our children were little, we gave them a little sniff of sleeping potion to help them sleep, or to help them be still for cleaning the teeth or the doctor's shots. It made them quiet and peaceful."

Mickey and Austin exchanged glances. "You're a chemist, Uncle. What is the stuff?"

He shrugged. "Just a home remedy, just a sleeping potion. That is all. It comes from the old country."

Austin raked a hand through his hair, making it stand up in all directions. "What is its chemical composition, its trade name, its properties? It causes amnesia, Dr. Gilbertino, and it makes people highly susceptible to any suggestion. Someone in your family is willing to use your home remedy to kill, so forgive me if I'm not buying your explanation right now."

If anything, Uncle only grew even quieter. He nodded thoughtfully and stroked his mustache. "Have you spoken with Lydia, then?"

Austin blinked. "That's a good question, but it's another subject. I still want to know about this so-called sleeping potion. Do you have it here? Can I take a sample with me?"

Uncle shook his head.

A flicker of an eye roll from Austin succinctly conveyed his disdain. "I thought not. Lydia ran before I could talk to her. I haven't heard from her since. She's the one who asked me to stop this mess, so I would assume that puts her in danger. Do you know where she is?"

"No."

Austin glanced at Mickey and she knew from his look it was time to pick up her purse. "Thanks for dinner," he said in a clipped tone, rising abruptly from the table. He took a card from his shirt pocket and set in on the table in front of Uncle. "Call me when you're ready to give me information I can use."

"You are angry with me, and I don't blame you." Uncle still sat in his chair with his hands folded on the table. He let Austin's card rest where Austin had laid it. "You have my word; no one else will die. I will stop this."

"Oh, really?" He raised his eyebrows. "It's that simple?"

"Next time, I will come to you, and you will see that I am not against you."

Austin set an intent stare on the old man, his doubt evident and unapologetic. "Come on, Mickey. We're done here." He turned on his heel and strode rapidly toward the front door.

She followed, but she watched Uncle until she reached the door, and she saw nothing in his expression but sorrow. It felt wrong, leaving him alone with his misery like that, even if he did probably create most of it himself. She stepped outside after Austin and pulled the door closed behind her, but she felt strongly, inexplicably sure that they should have stayed.

All the neighborhood children had gone indoors and the night air was cool and still as they returned to the station wagon. Austin wordlessly handed Mickey the keys. In the car, he selected a melancholy piano piece for the cassette player, fitting given the glumness of his mood. His quest for answers this day was ending in relative disappointment.

Mickey glanced at him after they had turned down the final stretch toward the warehouse. He was staring absently out the window. "Austin, I still don't think Uncle is guilty. Do you?"

He sighed wearily before answering her. "I don't want to think so. But best case scenario, he's protecting someone who is, and that's almost as bad."

"What are we going to do now?"

"I'll go back and analyze those samples I got from you earlier. If I'm lucky, my equipment will be sensitive enough to detect and identify the causative agent of your amnesia. I can take those results to the autopsy. If they find the same agent on Horton, it will provide enough evidence to get the police involved, at least."

Mickey smiled softly in the darkness. "Need any help?"

"It's late. You should go home." The corners of Austin's mouth turned up in his signature smirk. "Be sure to eat a light breakfast before you come back in the morning."

She made a face at him. "I think I'll skip breakfast." She signaled and pressed the brake as they approached the gravel lot surrounding the warehouse.

"Just don't pass out."

Mickey turned and pulled into the fenced yard, and drove in a wide half-circle in front of the sturdy concrete building. A waxing quarter moon gleamed white in the clear night sky, lending greater illumination to the yard than the single light bulb in the wall fixture above the front entrance. She came to a stop in the middle of the yard, with the passenger side closer to the door, and put the car in park. Just as she was turning to tell him good night, he suddenly set a restraining hand on her arm.

"Stay here a minute." His gaze was fixed toward the entryway of the warehouse, his voice low and tense.

Mickey felt her scalp tingle. "What's wrong?"

"Don't get out. Just stay right here."

"Austin…"

Already, he had opened the door and slid out of his seat. He pressed down the door lock and shut the door behind him. For a moment, he stood still, up next to the car. Then he drew himself upright and launched forward at his usual, brisk pace, directly toward the door.

He was within a dozen paces of his destination when Mickey's eyes detected movement in the shadows to his left. A lanky, ghostly figure was emerging from the dark, closing in on him fast, the right arm raised and brandishing an object up over his head.

A rush of panic filled Mickey's head as she fumbled clumsily with the door, unable to make her fingers work to open it fast enough. When she did, a scream ripped through the night that she only later recognized was her own voice. She stumbled out of the car just as the assailant's arm slashed down, moonlight glinting off the blade of a very large knife. She saw Austin drop to the ground and roll away. In an instant, he had sprung back onto his feet and backpedaled from his attacker, feet scuffing and kicking up gravel as he moved. Then he stopped; with a wide stance and flexed knees, arms outspread, he faced the man with the knife.

"Get back!" His voice barked the command with authority, not fear. His face in the dim light was fierce and glaring. For an instant, Mickey thought his directive was for her to get back in the car, but as she stood, clenching the top of the door frame in both hands, she could see all his attention was focused on the assailant standing directly between himself and the car. "Stay where you are. Stay! Now drop the knife. Drop it at your feet." The man continued to stand, holding the knife but making no move whatsoever to advance on Austin or to run away. "You will drop the knife now!" Austin shouted, carefully annunciating each syllable.

Mickey's mouth hung open as she watched the man release his grip on the knife and it fell with a thud to the ground.

"Don't move," Austin commanded, his voice substantially lowered. Only then did he take his eyes off the intruder and look at Mickey. He was breathing rapidly, looking wide-eyed and shocked in the aftermath.

"Austin, are you okay?"

"He's drugged, Mickey," he gasped. "He doesn't know what he's doing." He stepped up to the man, who stood half-a-head taller than him, bent down, and picked up the knife. The attacker stood absolutely still, in perfect obedience to Austin's last command. Austin brought the knife to the car and set it on the hood. Then Mickey noticed two things: the knife carried a curved blade measuring a full six inches, and Austin's gray shirt was wet with a slowly expanding patch of black near his shoulder.

"You're bleeding. Oh my gosh, Austin! Are you okay?" The pitch of her voice was rising with her horror, and she ran around to the other side of the car, fingers quickly unknotting and yanking at the scarf that was tying back her hair.

"Mickey…"

She folded over the scarf when she reached him. "I need to put pressure on that. We have to get you to a hospital."

"Mickey…"

"Who is that man? Have you ever seen him before?" With some effort, she stopped her frantic babbling and drew a deep breath. "What?"

Austin grimaced, clenched his teeth. He nodded toward the cab of the car as he leaned against the door for support. "Get on the phone. I think the police will listen to me now."


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Typical of a Sunday night in the city, the local emergency department was a riot of activity; nurses and technicians rushing about their business in navy and maroon scrubs, harried unit clerks masking their exasperation under a thin veil of detached politeness, a jumble of medical jargon and cryptic orders called from doctor to nurse and back again. Under the glare of overhead fluorescent lights, Mickey found herself sitting in a hard plastic chair, holding a bag containing Austin's clothes, watch, and wallet, and observing the three-way exchange going on between a nurse named Carol and a police detective named Bettner competing for Austin's attention.

"So let me get this straight, James. You saw the armed intruder stalking the entrance of your home and your response was to approach him and see whether he'd attack you?"

Sitting upright on a gurney and trailing IV tubing from one arm, Austin answered him with a cantankerous scowl. "I had good reason to believe he was under the influence of a strong hypnotic. I was testing the hypothesis that he would be highly suggestible to any verbal command, regardless of its source." Austin glared up at the detective. "And I was right. The guy would have high-stepped, singing 'Yankee Doodle,' if I'd told him to."

Before Bettner could respond, Nurse Carol pushed a clipboard into Austin's hands. "You've lost blood, and you may lose more in surgery. Sign here so we can give you a transfusion if necessary."

"Was that your thought while he was driving a knife in your back?"

Austin paused in scrawling his signature, but would give Bettner's dig no further reaction. Then he handed the clipboard back up to Carol. "A miscalculation," he muttered. Mickey stared openly at him, but he let his gaze settle anywhere but on her troubled face.

"Mr. James, are you allergic to any medications that you know of?"

"No."

"Any foods?"

"No."

"Tape, latex, iodine?"

"No, no, no." He made a wry face and addressed Bettner. "What have you found out about your suspect, anyway? Was there a connection to Etna's Little Italy?"

The officer sighed. "I hate to disappoint you, but no. None. His name is Willie Lee Haverland, and he's a known transient in your neighborhood. Generally, he's regarded as harmless; lots of criminal trespass and disorderly conduct charges on his record. He's a known drunk, and his blood alcohol level tonight was three times the legal limit."

"But what about his behavior? He dropped the knife because I told him to. He stayed still and didn't run anywhere just because he was told to stay. When the headlights of my car hit him, he kept staring at the warehouse door. He acted like he hadn't seen light. That's not a normal human response to sensory stimuli."

"I'll have to ask you both to leave now. Mr. James will be going to surgery." Carol pulled the rolling curtain surrounding the treatment room partially back and prompted Mickey to stand, ushering both Mickey and Bettner out.

Bettner slapped his notebook shut. "I have what I need for a report, James. I'm afraid I can't link anything to what you've told me about the Gilbertinos or James Horton. We're going to have to treat this as an isolated attack."

Austin stared at him, silent. Mickey could almost feel the frustration emanating from his body like an aura.

Bettner rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I'm not saying there's no merit to what you've told me. I just mean, at this time I have nothing to take to the D.A." He frowned. "Halverson will be released from the E.R. tonight and we'll take him in. Maybe he'll have something useful to say after he sleeps off the sauce."

"He won't remember a thing," Austin said quietly, closing his eyes.

Mickey began to follow Bettner from the room, until she heard Austin say her name. She stopped at once. "Yeah?"

"Ma'am, you need to leave right now," Carol interjected, a new edge to her voice.

Austin gladly leapt on the excuse to unleash some ire. "Just get out and give us a minute. I believe you've established I'm not dying." He waited until she broke eye contact and left the room, with pursed lips and a disgruntled shake of her head, before he turned to Mickey. "They're making me stay all night. I don't see a discharge happening before 7:30."

Mickey gave him a commiserate smile. "No autopsy, I guess."

"Not for me." He stared at her pointedly.

She stared back. Her face fell. "No, Austin! You aren't sending me to an autopsy by myself! I won't even know what they're talking about. I don't know what to look for, what to ask. The whole thing is morbid. That's your forte."

"Play the sympathy card. Tell Miles I'm laid up in the hospital, and all I need to feel better is a little vitreous sample."

"What?"

"Write it down," he demanded. "Vitreous. V-I-T-R-E-O-U-S. Get that and bring it back to the workshop."

"Where shall I put it?"

He began to shrug, gasped at the jolt of pain the movement produced, and thought better of it. "Just put it in the fridge," he groaned.

Mickey winced at his plight, and in close succession wrinkled her nose at his idea. "Ugh." She picked up the bag of his belongings and held it up. "Want me to take this, or do you want it to stay here?"

"Take it. Just bring me a change of clothes when you come back. I'll call you when I'm ready to go home."

Mickey left the hospital with every intention of doing Austin's dubious bidding. She didn't have to like it. He never promised her an easy job of working for him. Oh, no. In fact, he had promised the opposite. If he had given her the greatest adventure of her life, he had balanced it nearly evenly with the trouble. In the past ten months, she'd been tied up, nearly blown up, and was perilously near-strangled by an ape. Austin himself had been electrocuted, irradiated, run down by a van, pushed down an elevator shaft, framed and jailed, and as of tonight, stabbed.

It was the most ridiculous occupational hazards list conceivable for a run-of-the-mill secretary. But Austin James was no ordinary boss.

She reached the station wagon where she had parked it, in the back of the emergency department lot, well-illuminated by nearby light posts. She would have gone straight home and set her alarm to get up for the dreaded autopsy. She would have, but when she opened the car door, there on her seat rested her scarf just where she had left it, forgotten, hours ago.

It was crumpled, stiff, and stained beyond repair with blood. Austin's blood.

An hour and a half later, Austin James emerged from the fog of anesthesia. He blinked the sleep from his eyes, turned to look toward the doorway at his right, and found the chair beside his recovery room bed occupied by his secretary. His mouth felt arid when he opened it. He attempted a swallow before he attempted speech, and finally managed both. "Mickey."

She jerked upright out of a sleepy daze and looked at him, unsmiling.

"How did you get back here?"

"You listed me as your responsible contact. The nurse just let me in."

"Oh." He looked at her, a question in his eyes, but he waited for her to begin.

She took a deep breath and let her decision out in a rush. "I'm not going to the autopsy, Austin." Then she watched his face carefully. As soon as his mouth opened again, she pressed on. "I'm dropping this case, and I want you to drop it, too." She pouted her lips at him and waited for his next objection.

"What brought this—"

"I mean it. I'm not going to help you anymore. If you need help, then let the police do it." She ended on a tone of determined finality and looked down at her hands in her lap, bracing herself for his answer.

His mouth hung open and he stared at her, genuinely startled. "But the police are looking the wrong way. They won't be able to solve this. Come on, Mickey. What about James Horton and the other names on that list? What about Lydia? Who's going to bring justice to this if I just let it go? How many more people are going to lose their lives?"

"Are we counting yours?"

He released his breath in frustration. "It was a simple miscalculation. I should have dropped out of the way sooner."

"It was idiotic! And you left me to sit there and watch!" There was a tremor in her voice, and she hated that he heard it.

He turned away after that, and for a long moment there was no sound in the room but the rhythmic whir and click of the intravenous pump between them. After a time, he looked at her again. His brow was furrowed, but his expression was not angry; his voice was low, resigned. "You're right. I made a mistake."

Mickey didn't answer or even look at him, but the lines in her forehead smoothed out a little. She was listening.

"Any reasonable person would have stayed in the car and called the police. I was trying to prove a point…" He studied her face, her eyes that were darting in and out of contact with his. The cleft between his eyes deepened. "But I scared you, didn't I?" He waited until she would meet his gaze without looking away. "I'm sorry."

She released a long breath, and with it, much of the tension knotted between her shoulders. She even smiled, just a bit.

"Would you be willing to compromise?" he asked carefully.

"How?"

"I'll let Miles give me his toxicology report instead of running my own. I'll take it easy at the warehouse in the morning. We'll lay low all day. Anything that can't be accomplished by phone, I'll let it go."

She was trying to look severe, but a very persistent smile was betraying her. A contrite Austin was a rare sighting.

"We're agreed, then?" His eyebrows were arched so high, they were almost comical.

She hesitated, but only for a moment. "Okay."

"Good." At last, a smile crossed his lips. "Then go home and get some sleep. I'll call you."

* * *

Austin did, indeed, call Mickey in the morning. The first two calls were increasingly agitated complaints about the delays in a timely discharge. The third call heralded a threat to discharge himself and leave AMA. He even suggested he might call a cab to get himself home if Mickey didn't show in twenty minutes.

The hospital staff couldn't make him ride a wheelchair to the door, as per policy. The best they could accomplish was to send an orderly trailing after him with the wheelchair, a peculiar sight that drew many curious stares as they coursed the corridors to the front lobby. Mickey had brought him slacks and a button-down shirt well within his black-and-white comfort zone, and with his purposeful gait and aloof manner, it was hard to decipher whether Austin had been the patient or Mickey.

Only when he sat down in the car did Mickey see clearly how uncomfortable he really was. His face contorted in an involuntary grimace and he grunted. He shifted in his seat toward the right, and kept his torso upright and guarded. His mouth was drawn in a thin, hard line.

"Are you in a lot of pain?" She started up the car and threw a look of sympathy his way.

"It's okay."

"The doctor said you'd probably feel better if you'd wear the sling for a while."

"No, thanks."

"You could at least take one of your pain pills."

"They make me sleepy." He warned Mickey to silence with a hard glare. "No, that's not a good thing. They also make me sick to my stomach. I'll be fine without them."

The ride back to the warehouse was uneventful, but that changed when they reached the yard. Parked near the front entrance, in Austin's usual place, was a cherry red Camaro IROC-Z with the convertible top up.

"Guess we're late," Austin murmured.

Mickey did a double take between Austin and the sporty little car. "You were expecting someone?" She pulled up alongside the Camaro and parked. Quickly, she ran around to the other side of the car to help Austin out. She was careful to pull on his right arm, not left, once he had maneuvered himself around to the edge of the seat with both feet planted on the ground. That task accomplished, Austin gave her a subtle, appreciative nod and they both turned their attention to the visitor.

The driver's door opened, and out stepped a willowy, top-heavy woman wearing a form-fitting yellow halter top over a flowing, sarong-style, multi-colored skirt, and wedge-heeled sandals. She plucked off her sunglasses and broke into an expansive smile as she approached them.

"Mickey, I was hoping I'd see you once more before I left. Thank you so much for finding a place for me on this guy's busy schedule!" She sidled up to Austin and extended an affectionate arm around his waist. "Hi," she said brightly, turning her full attention to him.

"Belinda," he said, wearing his cryptic smile that revealed nothing of what was on his mind. "I hope I haven't kept you waiting long."

She waved off the idea with a flip of her hand. "It wasn't long, and I don't suppose you sit around all day waiting for photo ops." She darted away suddenly, back toward her car. "But speaking of which…" She reached into the passenger side and pulled out a camera bag. She set it on the hood and began assembling a professional-quality camera. "The weather is sure cooperating. I want to get some shots with your home for the backdrop. Mickey, can I take a few with you and Austin together?"

Mickey nodded. She couldn't remember having met Belinda, not in any vivid sense, but there was something vaguely familiar about her. She had an impression of the journalist wearing boldly-applied eyeliner that made her amber-colored eyes stand out, like cat's eyes. Today her makeup was more muted, more pastel.

"I don't mind showing you the inside, but I'd rather not have any pictures taken there," Austin said.

Belinda flashed him a sunny smile and set her camera strap around her neck. "Whatever you prefer. Let's do it."

Over the course of the next hour, she procured a number of rolls of photographs, and Austin invited her inside for a while. He deferred a tour to Mickey, who accommodated the young woman with a perfunctory walk-through of the living area and a couple of laboratory sites, and set her up with a glass of iced tea.

All the while, Belinda kept in close proximity to Austin, with a French-manicured hand on his shoulder or touching his sleeve. Eventually, they returned to the front yard again, and Belinda seemed ready to make her farewell. Feeling a bit like a third wheel by then, Mickey hung back near the door and let the two of them stroll on out into the yard, talking lightly about nothing in particular.

They only went as far as Belinda's car, and Mickey could hear their conversation quite clearly.

"I'm just an hour away by air, so if you get out around L.A…" She produced a card from somewhere on her outfit and slipped it into Austin's shirt pocket. He smiled.

"Thanks."

"I'm not just paying you lip service, either, Austin. Next time you want to give me my greatest adventure…" She laughed, and her voice was like music.

It was a fascinating thing, watching a socially well-versed woman like Belinda collide with the ever-analytical Austin James. Mickey still couldn't tell whether he was even aware he was being seduced. He still just stood there, smiling vaguely and watching Belinda's every move.

Then the journalist took it upon herself to give the good-bye she had in mind. Drawing near enough to Austin to eliminate the space between them entirely, she threaded her fingers through the wavy locks hanging thick at the back of his head, angled her lips against his, and pressed into them deeply. Austin, for his part, closed his eyes and allowed it.

Mickey raised an eyebrow and turned quickly away. There was no way Austin wanted her services anytime soon, and she wanted no further assault to her imagination from his moment with Belinda. She punched in the access code and returned to the inner sanctum of the warehouse. From there, she helped herself to the iced tea, and wandered over to the office area, sipping. She sat. There was nothing for her to do, but she wanted very badly to have something to do. So she logged on the main terminal and restored Austin's latest session. The information about Mateo DiAngelo, the missing Tuscany chef, returned to the screen.

It wasn't long before the door creaked open and Austin came back inside alone. He let out a long breath as he approached Mickey, and snatched his warehouse mic off the desk. "Mozart, Symphony 45. Well, that's finished."

Mickey smothered a slightly unwholesome smirk. "Finished? Looked to me like she was just getting started."

In response, he dropped Belinda's card in the trash and crossed the floor to the kitchen. He observed Mickey's open-mouthed stare. "I already told you, she's not my type." With that declaration, he opened a hood and removed a plastic-wrapped bagel. He began to split it with an exact-o knife from the drawer below.

"I don't understand you, Austin. She looked pretty much perfect to me, and she clearly likes you. What, exactly, _is_ your type?"

He smirked at her, just briefly, before looking downward to spread something brown and viscous on his bagel. "I don't judge based on appearances. If she likes me now, it's only because I'm new and different." He looked up again. "It's her attention span; it's lacking."

Mickey's attention had left the computer entirely. She swiveled her seat around and narrowed her eyes at Austin. "You need to tell me what that means; short attention span. You said the same thing about my date. Does that mean they're overly distractible? You couldn't keep her attention on any one thing? She's hyper?"

"Maybe a little," he quipped, with a glint in his eyes. He perched on a stool at the edge of the kitchen and took a small bite of the bagel. "Someone like that resides in the moment. They don't look back, and they only look forward to the extent they might find something better than they have now. Therefore, they're thrill-seekers, they're impulsive, and they're quite resilient."

"That doesn't sound so bad, when you put it that way."

"It isn't a value judgment; it is what it is. I just don't find it attractive. You can't trust someone with a short attention span. They love you today and don't remember you after next weekend. That's especially true when they've got the kind of physical attributes that draw in the opposite sex like ants to honey." He took another bite. "They know they'll never lack for admirers."

Mickey leaned back in her chair and looked at him thoughtfully. "Is this the voice of experience?"

"Strictly observational," he replied, smiling. The glint in his eyes returned. "Now it's your turn. What's your type?"

She laughed and sat upright again. "Since when do you care about something like that?" Later, on reflection, she would wonder how she might have answered him had the door buzzer not sounded right at that moment.

Austin glanced curiously toward the door. "Are we expecting anyone else?"

Mickey was already on her feet. She glanced briefly at the nearest security display, and her face lit up. She hurried to the door. "Great timing!"

She opened it to reveal a stout, mustached man of about sixty wearing large-rimmed glasses and carrying a string closure envelope and a bouquet of mixed wildflowers. "How's the convalescent?"

Austin stood up, his face alight with the welcome surprise. "Miles!"

The county medical examiner strode casually inside, directly to the kitchen, and began rummaging in the cupboard above the sink. "Your lovely Girl Friday informed me early this morning you were in need of some cheering up." With a satisfied smile, he pulled out a tall, narrow glass. He filled it partway with water and deposited the bouquet inside. "I brought you flowers." He presented his arrangement with a flourish.

"Is that all?"

Miles wagged his head and threw a look of disdain to Mickey. "'Is that all?' he says. The gall! What keeps you working for him, I don't know. I'd be much nicer to you if you were my secretary." He leered openly and Austin rolled his eyes.

"Don't be disingenuous; we both know the flowers are for Mickey. Did you bring me a report?"

A smug smile rose on Miles' face. "I did you one better." He pulled a small, glass test tube from his jacket pocket and placed it in Austin's eager grasp. "One vitreous sample from our late James Horton, as requested. But if anyone asks, you stole it from me." He winked at Mickey.

Instantly, Austin disappeared with Miles' offering into the depths of his laboratory. He opened both doors of a free-standing metal closet and began removing various bottles and instruments. "I've got my chromatograph in here somewhere. Mickey!" he called. "Go to the chemical lab and get me methanol, acetic acid, distilled—"

"Slow down, if you expect any of this to actually appear," she complained, walking quickly to the indicated storage area.

In a very short time, he had assembled an array of supplies on a counter within the lab. Miles watched him with his amusement evident beneath his mustache. "You're like a kid at Christmas, Austin. I hate to interrupt you, but since I'm only here on my lunch break, let me show you what else I brought, and then I'm going to leave you to figure out the puzzle by yourself."

Austin turned around with an arched eyebrow and took from the medical examiner's hand the string-latched envelope he had brought. He opened it immediately.

"It's the autopsy report on Joseph Albo. Mickey thought you'd want to see it. I got the final report back just a couple of days ago. I wasn't prepared to be so interested in a self-inflicted gunshot case, until I put it together with my initial findings on Mr. Horton. Look at the toxicology."

Austin frowned as he read over the papers. "He tested positive for a benzodiazepine. That's a hypnotic class of drug. But wouldn't a final report tell you exactly which drug?"

"Well done, Maestro. You found it."

Austin looked up. "So, what's the reason?"

"There's no name for it. The core structure of the substance came back clearly benzodiazepine. But the side chains are like nothing I've ever seen."

"What does it mean?" Mickey interjected. They might as well have been speaking Urdu.

Austin's brow furrowed and he shook his head, still studying the report. "It means Joseph was exposed to a drug that is unknown to the Food and Drug Administration. It's an uncharted substance."

"By itself, that raises questions, but I think you might be even more intrigued when you test my sample."

"You found the same thing, didn't you?"

Miles nodded. "Now, my equipment's not sensitive enough to do the level of testing I send out for, but at first glance, I'm not seeing something that looks familiar. I have to wonder whether we might find these two gentlemen have this oddity in common."

With a determined grunt, Austin lifted a weighty electronic instrument onto the lab table using just one arm, and Mickey hurried to give him a hand. She cleared away some of his other projects that were littering the table, including a mortar and pestle, and a sealed baggie half-filled with fine, gray gravel.

Miles picked up the baggie when it was placed before him. "One for your dirt collection, Austin?" he teased.

Mickey smiled warmly. "That's no ordinary dirt. He had to take us five miles out of our way and make us late for an appointment just for that."

"I believe it," Miles laughed. He turned back toward the front entrance. "You can keep the Albo report, Austin. It's just a copy. Let me know what you find out about our mystery drug." And because he was Miles, he added, "Send Mickey to tell me about it. She's nicer to look at than you." With a wave, he left them.

Mickey smiled after him, but when she turned back to Austin, her face fell. "What's the matter?"

He was looking at her intently, his work momentarily forgotten. "What you said about the pulverized rock sample; you remember when we got that?"

She shrugged. "I guess so."

He smiled. "That was Saturday morning, Mickey." Excitement was building in his voice. "You remember something from Saturday morning."

"I do?"

He frowned to himself and began to pace. "That means your amnesia is starting to recede, at least the retrograde aspect." He turned to face her again and froze where he was, lost in his thoughts. Then, like a flash of light in the dark, his entire face became suddenly animated, eyes opened wide, and he physically jumped. "That's it!"

"Eureka," Mickey murmured, smiling to herself. She waited patiently for him to explain his breakthrough.

"James Horton was drugged on a Thursday afternoon," he said, his speech flowing more rapidly as his thoughts tumbled ahead of him. "By Saturday morning, he remembered what happened, that someone had induced him to lose his job, and he went to confront that person. Joe Albo was drugged and induced to vandalism. Three days later, he remembered and most likely also went to confront that person. Whoever drugged them the first time drugged them again and prompted them to suicide. Our perpetrator is covering his or her tracks with murder." His eyes grew wide and seemed to glow with the intensity of his excitement. "Anyone who threatens to blow the lid off this situation is at risk." He smiled humorlessly. "Hence, the attempt on my life last night."

Mickey turned worried eyes to him. "No wonder Lydia's terrified. Austin, she's in a lot of trouble now if Vinnie is the one who's killing people. What are we going to do?"

His face was grim, his jaw set. "Find her before Vinnie does." Then he looked up at Mickey and acquired an expression of pure innocence. "Starting tomorrow?"

She pursed her lips at him. "Don't be a smart-alec." But the scolding only made him smile wider. "Do you have enough you can take it to the police yet?"

"No. I still need two things: one mystery drug and one witness."

Mickey frowned. "How will you get those?"

"I'll know more about the drug once I finish studying my samples here." He returned his gaze to the array of materials spread out on his laboratory table. "The witness is a done deal."

"You sure have a lot of confidence we'll find Lydia."

"That's not the witness I had in mind," he answered, a meaningful smile creeping up the corners of his mouth as he looked at her. "I should have one right here in about…" he glanced at his watch. "Nineteen hours."


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Lydia Para was a twenty-year-old liberal arts major who lived off campus in an overpriced, student-oriented apartment she shared with two roommates. At three o'clock on a Monday afternoon, Mickey couldn't fathom why Austin was intent on visiting the place. It seemed unlikely they would find her there even if she wasn't on the run from her employer. But Austin insisted there was no better place to begin a search. Even if the subject was absent, the remnant of her recent presence would provide, in itself, information. And in the mind of Austin James, no information was inherently disposable.

Austin led the way into the three-story, aluminum-sided building's foyer, directly up one flight of stairs, around a bend and straight down the hall, last door on the right. For a man who had been stabbed and patched back together within the last twenty-four hours, he was moving at a pretty good clip. Most of his frenetic energy, while maybe not quite up to his _moto perpetuo_ standard, was restored.

He pounded three times on the door and waited.

"These girls are students, Austin. Do you really think anyone's going to be here?"

"I hope not." He offered a very benign smile at the look Mickey gave him, reached into a pocket of his slacks, and held aloft a set of his favorite lock picks.

Mickey groaned. "Can't we just come back later?"

He ignored her and set to work. Austin's skill with lock picks was dubiously efficient. He had the door ajar in the space of thirty seconds. He slipped quickly inside, Mickey crowding him from behind, and turned and silently closed the door behind them. From there, he stepped boldly across the large living room with its green shag carpet and began to inspect every surface, every personal article.

He had promised to lie low at home all day, and he would have made good on that promise had Mickey held him to it; she knew that much. But she couldn't insist. Deep in the more candid regions of her mind, she knew that her need to expose the truth of the matter was every bit as compulsive as Austin's. Ever since discovering the dawning reversal of her amnesia, Mickey suspected Austin was hoarding answers to the mystery that would bring sense to it and probably identify which parties were engaged in sabotage, and which had crossed that line to commit murder. But Austin was cagey with his crime theories until he could tease evidence out of them. So here she was in an absurdly familiar circumstance, assisting her boss in breaking and entering a stranger's apartment-all in the name of science, of course.

He was hovering over an answering machine set next to a telephone on a wobbly end table. The digital display indicated three messages resided on the machine, none of them new. He pressed play. The first message was a young woman calling for one of the roommates. The second was Lydia's mother, a standard social call, with a request to return the call whenever convenient. The last was a young male, also calling for Lydia. As the voice relayed the message, Austin turned to Mickey with a tight smile, his eyes gleaming.

"Lydia, call me before you talk to anyone else. Just don't…Don't do it. Just call me first, and I'll take care of everything. I'll make it all right; you can still trust me. I'll be at home today, so call me. Please."

"Do you think it's Alonzo?"

Austin nodded, still smiling. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of paper while he quickly crossed the room to a countertop that bordered the kitchen and living room. He bent to write on the paper. Then he extracted a piece of tape from a dispenser on the counter and returned to the answering machine, affixing his note there. He regarded Mickey archly. "I'll leave her a message of my own."

It was the order ticket with the list of names. Over Lydia's name, Austin had drawn a question mark. Below, he had written his phone numbers for the warehouse and for the car.

He smiled briefly, but he was grim. "Now, we wait."

When they were back in the car, he took the time to explain what he had done. "All the evidence suggests Lydia's been back there since yesterday. She might even be with Alonzo now. She knows about the sabotage and the druggings, and she's looking for a way out. Alonzo wants her to keep quiet about it. There's a fifty percent chance she'll pursue my help anyway. It depends on whether she trusts Alonzo to protect her from his family. That depends on how much power Alonzo has to guarantee it." He acquired a look of self-satisfaction as he gazed ahead out the window with a faraway look. "And if she takes the bait, then I can set to work eroding her confidence in Alonzo completely."

"And what if she doesn't take the bait?"

His mouth curved upward; he was wholly unperturbed by the suggestion. "This isn't the only plan. I'll move on to the next one."

"So what do we do now? Go back and wait for a call?"

He nodded. "We will, eventually." He glanced at Mickey. "How about an early dinner first? Italian okay?"

"Oh, Austin, not Vida again!"

"Nope, not this time. How about we compare your dining experience at Etna's with Catania's Ristorante and Catering?" He looked aggravatingly amused at her displeasure. "Let's go!"

* * *

The most striking feature of Catania's was how incredibly similar it appeared to Etna's, at least on the surface. Right down to the white portico and tendrils of vines creeping up the stone façade, Elisa Gilbertino Feltz's restaurant was such an echo of her sister's, Mickey could have picked it out without the benefit of a sign.

The parking lot was larger, and the neighborhood was younger. The place was positioned in advantageous proximity to two local colleges and a bustling business district. As Austin and Mickey entered the lobby, the difference in styles of the two sisters was immediately apparent. While Etna's maintained a classic, family feel, Catania's featured a large, three sided bar with a leather top, on-tap microbrews, and multiple televisions broadcasting different sporting events. Instead of piped Sinatra, Elisa's restaurant boasted hard rock. Signs in the entryway promoted live music gigs and a weekly open mike night.

Austin helped himself to a menu from a rack beside the hostess station. His eyes swept each page quickly, and he returned it to the stand.

"Not bad," he murmured.

Mickey glanced up at him curiously.

"You get a better value here. The menu items are simpler; elegant, but not pricey. You can order gourmet if you care to, but the prices are mostly economical. Elisa has a good strategy for pulling in a lot of business." He glanced up at the cathedral ceiling with its molded plaster panels and indirect lighting system. "Given the location and the décor, Elisa has funneled a lot of money into this venture. I wonder where that came from."

"Table for two?"

Austin shifted his attention to the young hostess standing before them. He drew himself erect. "I wonder whether I might speak to Mrs. Feltz. I'm affiliated with a corporation downtown, and I'm interested in possibly retaining a new catering service for a couple of upcoming business functions. Is she available?"

The young woman nodded. "She's here. I'll let her know. What name should I say?"

"Austin James."

"Would you care to wait in the bar?"

"Thank you."

They took seats at the bar, on elevated, well-padded stools. While dining at such an early hour and on a Monday attracted a rather sparse patronage, the bar was well-populated. It was a young crowd, disproportionately male; one that drank beer, nodded to the beat of the music, and cast blatant, appraising leers at any passing female of a suitable age. So it was with mixed sentiments Mickey noted she still managed to turn some heads as she passed by, following Austin to one corner of the bar where he had a clear vantage of the entire room.

As soon as they sat, and Austin had declined drinks from the bartender, he leaned in to speak in a low voice to Mickey while never taking his eyes off the room. "What do you notice?"

She shrugged. "It's a typical, college-town bar. It has the usual snacks, lots of beer, wine, and liquor. It looks new. The music is sort of loud in here."

"What about the employees?"

She glanced at him sidelong and smiled wryly. "You're obviously noticing something."

"They're heterogeneous." He caught the look she gave him, rolled his eyes, and continued. "I mean, they're blond, red-headed, Hispanic. They have names that probably end with a consonant."

"And Vida's were all Italian, weren't they?"

"Italian, and mostly related to Vida. Elisa has a different hiring standard."

"So what does that mean?"

Before Austin could answer, the hostess reappeared. "If you follow me, Elisa will see you back in the private dining room." They got up and followed the girl out of the barroom, through the main dining room, and up to a set of French doors draped with black lace curtains. She opened the doors and led them into a small dining area, furnished with about nine tables, and a minibar in one corner.

"This is Mr. James."

In the room stood a woman, not tall and quite slender, mid-forties. She was hovering over one of the dining tables, jotting in a lined notebook. Her features were distinctly Italian, her clothing brightly-colored and curve-hugging, her shoulder-length hair teased and set. Her makeup was dramatic, and when she looked up from what she was writing and saw them, the ready smile on her ruby lips faltered and the notepad she held in her hands fell to the floor. "Oh damn!" she said fretfully.

At the same time, Mickey inhaled sharply and grasped Austin's arm.

Austin gave a great performance of appearing not to notice either reaction, and simply bent down for Elisa's notepad. He stood up, offering her both the book and a handshake. "Nice to meet you. Want to sit down?" Without waiting for Elisa to find her voice, he stepped up to the nearest table and seated himself there.

Elisa clutched the notepad to her chest. She was licking her lips, her eyes darting from Mickey to Austin to the open French doors through which they had entered the room. "I know who you are. You have been speaking to my sister. Why are you here?"

"I heard you offer exceptional catering. I was thinking of throwing a party."

Even her hands were visibly trembling as she spoke. She strode briskly past both of them and pulled the French doors closed. Then she turned around, hands behind her back and her back to the door. "I don't have anything to say to you. Go back to Vida. Please, I don't wish for any trouble."

Austin frowned. "I haven't come to bring trouble. Maybe you could enlighten me. What kind was I supposed to bring?"

"You must know Vida offers the same services as I. You saw her first, and she comes highly recommended. I can't help you."

"I'm asking for mini quiche, not representing you in court."

"Austin," Mickey murmured urgently from behind him.

He acknowledged her with a tip of the chin but didn't reply. Instead, he addressed Elisa further. "You have a beautiful set up here, Elisa. Did you establish this all by yourself? If so, I'm impressed."

Elisa watched him without moving, and they stared at each other. But when the impasse stretched to uncomfortable lengths, she looked away, sighed, and finally relented and joined him at the table.

Austin smiled faintly, but kept his guard firmly in place. "Sit down, Mickey," he urged gently, without looking behind him to see that she was still rooted to the same spot she'd held since first laying eyes on Elisa. He waited until she sat in the chair next to him, across from Elisa. "This is Mickey Castle," he told Elisa, "but I believe you two already met a couple of days ago."

The woman looked at her hands. "What is it you want, Mr. James?"

Austin leaned forward, elbows on the table. "I want to hear a story. I want to hear about a truckload of groceries that went into a ravine. Do you know it?"

"What business is it of yours?" She looked up again, a sneer on her lips and tears glistening in her eyes. "Why can't you just leave all of us alone?"

"Leave _you_ alone? First you drugged my secretary, and then you arranged a very nasty welcome for me at my home last night. I'd say I have a special invitation into your problems."

"What are you talking about?"

Mickey eyed her darkly. "You don't know someone tried to kill him?"

"And your delivery truck driver is dead as well," Austin added.

Elisa was on her feet, holding her head in her hands and pacing with great agitation. "No, no, no, no. This can't be." She twisted back toward Austin and Mickey. "It wasn't me! I did not kill that man, Mr. James. I don't even know who he is. And you! I don't know where you live, and I don't even have a reason to want you dead. Why would I do such a thing and jeopardize my reputation?"

Austin rose arduously from his low, armless chair, employing his right arm and leg and a low grunt to accomplish the task, a sign not lost on Mickey that he wasn't as mended as he tried to project. He faced Elisa with a glower. "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you haven't killed or tried to kill anyone, but I know one thing with absolute certainty: you caused at least two innocent people to lose their memory and act against their will. What did you do to that delivery man, Elisa? How did you get him to throw away his load?"

She stopped pacing and picked up a paper napkin from a table, dabbed at the dark rivulets of mascara seeping from under her eyes. "What do you think will happen to me when I tell you?"

Austin's eyes flicked heavenward. "Stop with the theatrics and just give me a straight answer. No one's going to hurt you. And if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from either me or the police."

She straightened, sniffled just once, and gallantly composed herself. Her eyes narrowed. "I have done nothing—_nothing_, Mr. James—but defend myself and my restaurant. I am not the one you are looking for."

The conversation was brought to an abrupt end with the sounding of a painfully loud buzzer. Mickey was on her feet in an instant, hands over her ears, and next to Austin, who frowned and stared past Elisa toward the French doors. At once, he darted off that way, both women close behind.

In the main dining room, patrons were casually filtering out toward the lobby, and more patrons were leaving the bar as the unrelenting buzzer continued to assault the ears and render all conversation impossible. Employees were dashing here and there, trying to direct customers toward the exits and break up a couple of milling knots of people who weren't making any serious moves to leave.

There came a muffled pop that resembled a clap of thunder from somewhere in the back of the restaurant, and a moment later the swinging doors to the kitchen burst open. A rotund, white-clad chef staggered through the open doorway with rolling clouds of thick, oily smoke billowing and cascading forward into the main room of the building. "Fire!" he shouted needlessly, and he lumbered forward. In seconds, black smoke and a pungent gasoline odor was everywhere.

With the evidence of a true catastrophe now on the scene, a new sense of urgency and panic descended on the remaining occupants of the restaurant and they fled. Mickey felt herself jostled and nearly pushed over by one and then another body, and then Austin was there, steadying her and pulling her in front of him by her arms, guiding her toward the nearest fire exit with one hand firmly gripping her round the shoulder.

They slipped out of the darkened restaurant and into the relatively bright sun of late afternoon and Austin continued to pilot her away from the building. He didn't stop until they had crossed the yard and reached the sidewalk. Then he turned her around and studied her face, his mouth and jaw tense. "That was a madhouse. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. Where's Elisa?"

"Stay right here. I'm going back to find out."

She gripped his arm tightly with both hands. "You're not going inside!"

He smiled in spite of his urgency. "I'll just walk around the building. I'll be right back." He reclaimed his arm and jogged back toward the smoke-engulfed restaurant. The distant honking and wailing sirens of fire department vehicles grew ever louder, and soon superseded the fire alarm commotion from inside Catania's.

Austin didn't have far to go. As the crowd of recent patrons and curious bystanders parted for the first fire truck that arrived at the rear of the building, Elisa could be seen just outside the delivery door, dangerously close to the choking, black smoke. Her shoulders were shaking with sobs as she staggered away from the building and fell into the outstretched arms of her older sister, who was racing toward her. Austin saw it the same time Mickey did, and he stopped where he was. Smoke roiled around the sisters, close kin and fierce rivals, who were at that moment suffering a shared grief. They were more than sisters; they were two sides of a single coin.

* * *

"It's going to be a long time before I'll want to see Italian food again," Mickey said before popping the last bite of her second taco in her mouth. She stretched out her legs and wiggled her shoeless toes under the kitchen table back at the warehouse. It felt so good to sit and eat and be still. Austin, however, could only regard such an idea as quite foreign.

He had barely stopped long enough to take a few bites before he retreated back to the lab to study his samples he had left earlier in the day. Now he sat before an electron microscope, rigged to a monitor for easier viewing. "What kind of chemistry is this?" he grumbled.

"Did you find our mystery drug?"

"I found something, but it makes no sense." He peered directly into the microscope for another view that way.

Mickey polished off the rest of her ice water, slipped her shoes back on, and got up to join Austin. "Do you have any more ideas about who the murderer is?"

He pushed back in his seat and swiveled around in his chair toward her. "Nothing I haven't already considered." The look he fixed on her was intent enough to make her feel like another one of his specimens for the microscope. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"What do you remember about Elisa? You knew her as soon as you saw her."

Mickey tried to remember. She willed herself to remember. But in the end, all she could relay to Austin were images, disjointed fragments of impressions that couldn't add up to one solid recollection. She scrunched her face in frustration. "I can't do it, Austin! I just see her with those painted-on eyebrows and that look in her eyes, and I have this feeling of dread. I don't remember anything we said. I don't see anything else."

He leaned forward. "How about sound, Mickey. Do you hear anything?"

She came up blank. "Nothing."

"Odor, then. What do you smell?" He was studying her closely, his focus narrowed further. "Close your eyes."

She sat against the edge of the lab table and did as he asked. Her eyebrow lifted just a fraction. "Flowers," she said breathlessly. She opened her eyes. "Lavender. Something else, too. It's sweet, very sweet."

"Roses? Freesia?" He named off two or three others.

Mickey smiled. "Honeysuckle."

"Lavender and honeysuckle," Austin mused. "I need just a little bit more. Was it the perfume she was wearing?"

"Austin, my head hurts."

He sat back again and let out a nearly silent sigh. "It's all right. You're not quite ready yet."

"You still think it'll get better?"

"Yes." He regarded her seriously. "You might want to swing by your house before it gets late and pack up a few things. I need you to bunk upstairs tonight."

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "What for?"

She was sure he was biting his lip to stifle a small smile. He checked his watch. "Don't worry, it's nothing personal. At some point between now and 8:00 a.m., you're going to remember a lot more. I want to be there when you do."

She stared at him. "It's me," she said, as realization dawned on her. "The witness you were counting on is me, isn't it?

He stood up and motioned at her. "Come on." He went to his desk and picked up the car keys, handing them off to Mickey when she reached him. "It would certainly help if you do remember something, but I wouldn't say I'm counting on it. I have enough of a picture of what's going on I'll probably be able to pull off a pretty convincing bluff tomorrow." He grinned.

She grimaced at him, but before she could reply, the speaker phone rang from overhead. "Is it Lydia?"

Austin touched the mike at his collar. "Patch it in. Austin James."

The voice that answered was not Lydia. It was young and male, and it went straight to the point. "Stay away from Lydia Para. She doesn't want to talk to you. If you come over again, you'll deal with me."

Austin's face clouded. "Where is she?"

"She's safe, and she's going to stay that way as long as I have anything to say about it."

"Alonzo." He wasn't asking.

If Austin's assumption was correct, the caller didn't sound surprised. "You want to help, Mr. James? Then keep your nose out of it. I'm taking care of Lydia."

"By 'taking care of,' I assume you mean in a manner that Lydia and the local law enforcement would find acceptable."

"Listen to me. A lot of the reason that woman you're coming around with is alive and well right now is because of me. It's in your best interest to believe what I say. There is nothing you can do to help Lydia, and there is nothing she can say to you that won't get her hurt. I'm not going to let that happen, Mr. James."

"If you're in that much danger, why can't you go to the police, Alonzo?"

He barked a harsh laugh at that. "Are you kidding? It's family. Ciao." He hung up.

Mickey and Austin exchanged stunned looks. "What are we dealing with, Austin? The mafia?" A shiver ran through her. Austin's car keys were still in her grip, but suddenly she didn't want to go anywhere.

Austin hesitated, thinking. Then he beckoned Mickey with a glance toward the door. "Let's go." He led the way.

She frowned. "Where?"

"I'll come with you to get your things. We can stop for a few groceries on the way back." If it were not for the deep sense of foreboding inside of her and the troubled look Austin wore, she would have been touched by such a peculiar level of attentiveness coming from that source.

"Are you still planning to go through with your bluff tomorrow?"

He pressed his lips together, grim. "Absolutely. We're going to pull the plug on this nonsense." He sighed. "It sure would be helpful if I could get a hold of the actual drug that was used." He shook his head. "It would help a lot."

"Then ask for it."

He looked at her, mystified.

"Uncle!" she cried. "You know he has the drug. Call him and tell him to give it to you."

He seemed to rest on the cusp of rejecting such an obvious idea, and then he changed his mind. His jaw became set like steel and he charged back to the countertop where he had left his warehouse mike and picked it up. "Call Claudio Gilbertino," he directed.

The phone rang four times before it was picked up, and an elderly woman answered, speaking Italian.

"Auntie? This is Austin James, calling for Uncle. Is he there?"

"One moment." After a brief pause, Uncle himself came on the line. His voice sounded tired.

"Austin? Is that you?"

"You told me you were going to stop this, Dr. Gilbertino."

"Will you be home tonight?"

Austin's mouth was a thin, hard line. "I'm not sure I want to answer that."

There was a pause. "You were a superb contender at chess as a boy, Austin. I wonder whether either of us can still play the game. Might I visit tonight, for old time's sake?"

"I'll be watching for you."


End file.
